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Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the performer) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the director includes a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose visage remains hidden but he maintains genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October