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Arriving as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

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. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we didn’t really need or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17