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Coming as the revived bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17