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Arriving as the revived bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, 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 enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller 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 film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator 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 path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17