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Debuting as the revived Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming 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 God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October