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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties 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 excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into reality facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the initial film, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The script is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to histories of protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in America and Britain on 17 October