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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October