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Coming as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October