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Coming as the re-activated master of horror machine was persistently generating adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, young performers, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release During Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as once-dominant genre specialists the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the physical realm made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while bad represents Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a story that was formerly close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The follow-up film is out in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on 17 October