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Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was persistently generating screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, filling in details 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 made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October