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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17