Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Funnily enough the call came from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.
Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles
The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from the monster movie to the suspense story to Drop to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …
Supernatural Transformation
The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is noticeably uncreative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.
Mountain Retreat Location
The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The script is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to histories of main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or want to know about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into massive hits, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against such a creature.
Over-stacked Narrative
The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he does have genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a grainy 8mm texture to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that seems excessively meta and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.
Unpersuasive Series Justification
Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.
- The follow-up film is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on October 17
