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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was continuing to produce film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October