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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release During Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17