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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, 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. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. 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 an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17