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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the actor acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release Amidst Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to their thriller to Drop to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the first, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for hero and villain, filling in details we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into massive hits, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film is out in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on 17 October