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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found within the household, 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 tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees 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 writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October