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Coming as the revived bestselling author machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

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

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into reality facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, 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 location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17