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Coming as the resurrected bestselling author machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes the studio are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, 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 short story can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17