What’s scarier than a killer clown attacking “innocents” on Halloween? The corny dialogue, cringeworthy acting, lackluster costumes and painfully predictable plot in Colin Krawchuk’s “The Jester 2.”

What felt like a Tubi movie on steroids, “The Jester 2” would be better off as a YouTube short film than a full-length feature. With minimal eeriness, the film is likely to turn to dust in the audience’s minds, just like the central antagonist.

The film follows Max (Kaitlyn Trentham), a teenage reject and self-proclaimed magician, as she makes the almost fatal mistake of tricking a demon, The Jester (Michael Sheffield), who made a deal with the devil for immortality. Tricking The Jester accidentally puts Max’s soul at risk of eternal damnation if she does not comply with his demands: She must help him sacrifice four souls before Halloween is over.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with placing time limits on character actions, in horror films — and this film especially — it feels like a cheap, overused tactic to keep the story moving. It does move but painfully slowly. Especially at the beginning, the film wastes time characterizing Max as an insecure victim of bullying, all because she likes to practice magic tricks.

While it’s entirely plausible that there are 15-year-old girls who are getting their bike tires popped by high school seniors for doing card tricks, it would feel more appropriate if that plotline were in a Disney Channel Original Movie as opposed to a supernatural horror flick.

Also, a major plot detail is that Max is asthmatic and needs her inhaler if she runs for more than five seconds. The Jester capitalizes on this and steals her inhaler, which further puts Max at his will. While creative, this was very silly and made the audience in the theater laugh multiple times.

The only actor in this film who gave a performance worth mentioning was Trentham as Max. The entire script is extremely corny, especially her magic mentor, Willie (Dingani Beza), saying being a magician was “honest work,” but Trentham is the only one to give a compelling performance with perfectly timed reactions, line delivery and screams when needed.

Unfortunately, the screams from Max rarely got a reaction out of the audience, as there is nothing frightening about the film. Not a single jump scare stands out during the film, and many of the murders committed by The Jester are oh-so-conveniently out of frame. It’s a shame because the especially gory moments are the most satisfying.

When Max tries to call the police for help, an officer places The Jester in handcuffs. Being a demon, however, he slips out of the cuffs and places them on the officer instantaneously. The Jester then magically makes the handcuffs close so tightly on the officer’s wrists that his hands are severed. Seeing his hands fall to the ground as blood gushes from his stumps is disgustingly satisfying.

The other death that should have been more explicitly shown, because it was relatively creative, is The Jester’s murder of one of Max’s bullies, Logan (Hassen Kacem). As Logan tries to start a fist fight with The Jester, the demon teleports out of his coat jacket and uses his magic demon powers to tighten the jacket around Logan’s abdomen to the point where his guts spilled out. The Jester then uses garden shears to stab the throat of Logan’s corpse — a nice touch.

Unfortunately, none of these scenes has the much-needed fear factor. They might have made some viewers in the theater uncomfortable with the amount of fake blood, but The Jester himself is too silly to take seriously. He is also closer to a mime than a jester because his main “creepy factor” is that he doesn’t speak, except for using a disembodied voice to overexplain the situation to Max in a dreamlike scene.

That scene served to explain the rules by which The Jester operated, but it is so long and cheesy that it should’ve been cut entirely. Before The Jester spoke to Max directly, he used a Ouija board to talk to her, and the words he spelled out appeared on the screen in bold letters in a visually unappealing way that felt more like a movie trailer than an effective exposition scene.

Several horror film tropes are also overdone in this film, which are severely outdated. A car radio warning residents to lock their doors following a string of murders in the area may have been a staple of horror flicks when radio news was commonplace, but now, it can only be seen as a cheap attempt at world-building.

Ultimately, “The Jester 2” is closer to a horror parody than a legitimate horror film, but to give credit where it’s due, it is significantly better than its predecessor. With a tease at the end that Max may take up the mantle as the next Jester, the only thing scarier would be having to sit through “The Jester 3.”