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Coming as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was not referenced, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The script is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October