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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 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 initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat 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 late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions 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 features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October