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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October