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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, 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 …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the acting team. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17