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Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke 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 overly complicated and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests 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 …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and highly implausible case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on 17 October