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Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation 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 his descendant, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a film that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them by way of Freddy's domain with a power to travel into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars 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 huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a series that was already nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose visage remains hidden but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the United States and United Kingdom on October 17