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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the actor acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a film that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a power to travel into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October