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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. With its small town 70s backdrop, young performers, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, strengthened by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a compact tale can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our surviving character Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film debuts in Australia's movie houses on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17