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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While sexual abuse was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, 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 killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The main character and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already almost failing, including superfluous difficulties to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed overly occupied with inquiries about the hows and whys of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and designed to reflect the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17