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Arriving as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, telepathic children and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending the process of killing. While molestation was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, reinforced by Ethan Hawke playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even excluding that discomfort, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist 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 unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more deliberate action to guide the production in the direction of the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered 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 face we never really see but he possesses genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17