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Coming as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. 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 a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

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