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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17