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Debuting as the resurrected Stephen King machine was persistently generating film versions, without concern for excellence, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, trapped by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a basic scary film. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose visage remains hidden but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a rough cinematic quality to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and highly implausible case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

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