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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the actor portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached 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 ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or want to know about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17