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Coming as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, gifted youths and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the performer acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Filmmaking Difficulties

The follow-up debuts as previous scary movie successes Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, 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 much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Supernatural Transformation

The initial movie finished with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled filmmaker Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a power to travel into reality facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays effectively jarring but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of protagonist and antagonist, supplying particulars we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously almost failing, 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 feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the sequel, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and highly implausible argument for the birth of a new franchise. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel releases in Australian theaters on 16 October and in America and Britain on October 17