The scenes deliver reasonably efficient scares, but with the tension level repeatedly and disconcertingly reset afterwards to zero: the scenes don’t develop or accumulate anything within a story arc and it feels as if the movie is jumping the shark and jumping back again, increasingly spending more and more time the wrong side of the shark and finally staying there. The way they battle Pennywise as grownups is not much different from the way they did it as kids (although, arguably, these new confrontations are unlocking painful childhood memories) and Chapter Two seems to consist of an indefinite number of big, scary set pieces, featuring interchangeable snaggle-toothed creatures, or occasionally gigantic, fairground-sized monsters lurching grotesquely up out of nowhere. Muschietti is even hinting at a possible third chapter. The second time around, your tolerance for this is tested to destruction and beyond because, unlike the first movie, it is just so pointlessly long: approaching three hours, with our heroes finally beginning to assume a glassy-eyed solemnity like Hogwarts graduates or the Fellowship of the Ring. But, like the first film, it becomes a virtual non-narrative anthology of standard jump-scares that could be reshuffled and shown in any order. It is also about the ubiquitous availability of the past in the digital age and the permanent reunion-stalkerthon of social media, and about the way guilt and shame are built into what we choose to remember and forget about our teenage years. There is some lively stuff here, including a few sensational cameos and interesting ideas about confronting one’s personal demons, about homophobia, abuse and depression.

Screenwriter Guy Dauberman (who worked on The Conjuring franchise) adapts the second half of King’s novel and the director once again is Andy Muschietti. Now, almost 30 years later, they are all grown up and must return to their home town to face the horrible Pennywise all over again – as adults. His relationship to them made him an antichrist version of ET. That was the story of how a bunch of middle-school kids in a small American town in the 1980s banded together to defeat a homicidal harlequin of hell called Pennywise. The second half of Stephen King’s horror bestseller about the terrifying clown (is there any other kind?) has now been adapted as a separate but frankly laborious film to follow the first one.

Pet cemetery audiobook