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Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, young performers, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized 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 too focused on its tiring griminess to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding 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 Finn, still trying to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October