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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a retro suburban environment, teenage actors, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to histories of main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons 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 does have authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October