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Coming as the resurrected bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched 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 avoided in discussion, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can generate multiple installments. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into reality facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October