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Debuting as the revived bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to background information for main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October