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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated 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 brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his frustratingly crude 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 the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to background information for hero and villain, providing information 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 similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he does have authentic charisma that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on 17 October