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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-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 supernatural one, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October