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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating screen translations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

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