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Debuting as the re-activated bestselling author machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October