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Coming as the revived Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, strengthened by the actor acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its wearisome vileness to work as only an mindless scary movie material.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is overly clumsy in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked 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 close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. 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 acting team. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October