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Coming as the revived master of horror machine was persistently generating adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The writing is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The environment is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October