Aw man. And it looked like video game movies were getting better, too…
For those of you who didn’t know, Five Nights At Freddy’s is a horror survival game that saw a hapless security guard stuck on a night shift getting chased around a dilapidated family restaurant by marauding, hulking, animatronic mascots who have been inconveniently brought to live by the ghosts of murdered children and since its debut in 2014, it’s gone on to amass quite the media empire with sequels, novels, toys and countless other forms of merchandising erupting from the concept.
And yet, it’s taken nearly ten years for Freddy, Bonnie, Chicka and the gang to score themselves a movie and since that time, the cuddly mascot gone nuts sub genre has already hacked up a couple of pretenders with Willy’s Wonderland, Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey and The Banana Splits Movie getting in on the action. In a time when titles based on video games are finally getting some respect, can this titan of survival horror slay at the box office?
Mike Schmidt is a troubled guy who can’t put the childhood abduction and disappearance of his brother, Garret behind him and as a result, he keeps losing jobs thanks to the fact that he’s an incredibly – but understandably – intense person. Obsessed with drawing out every detail that may still linger in his tortured memory, his spikey demeanor means that he’s also struggling to keep custody of his emotionally closed off kid sister, Abby and so in an act of desperation, he accepts a job to be the night watchman of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a long since defunct family restaurant whose mysterious owner simply can’t let go of.
If Mike acknowledges the practically endless fields of red flags this triggers, he doesn’t seem to want to let on, so night after night he watches the place, but whenever he inevitably dozes off, he dreams lucidly of Garret like he never has before and becomes convinced that sooner or later, if he sticks at the job, he’ll finally remember something important.
However, while he does this, there’s the not so small matter of the restaurant’s inhabitants: four, large, animatronic mascots that stomp about the place like a bunch of Terminators have been bodily dragged through Mickey Mouse’s Clubhouse, however, local, friendly police officer Vanessa, assures him that the glowy-eyed robots are harmless.
Of course, as time goes on, it becomes childishly obvious that they really aren’t, but Mike finds that after bringing Abby to work, his sister starts to bond with the sinister automatons.
What is really powering Freddy Fazbear and his glowering compadres? Why is their bond so strong? And what does any of this have to do with Garret’s disappearance? As Mike tenure reaches its fateful fifth night, you may find that it probably isn’t worth the wait…
It’s weird when something with such a strong following occurs right under your very nose (nothing makes you feel as old as when your pre-pubescent nephew clues you into something that’s popular), but anyone who doubted Five Nights At Freddy’s has to concede that Hollywood doesn’t just grant movies to any old video game – in fact, if it did we’d probably be up to our eyeballs in movies about Super Bomberman and Quebert. However, when it comes to the quartet of Freddy, Bonnie, Foxy, Chicka and whatever the fuck that hyperactive cupcake is called, you can’t help but think that in this case, Hollywood should have reset their game.
Simply put, for a movie that sees a bunch of possessed robots try to kill The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson as he darts about a restaurant, Five Nights At Freddy’s is unconscionably dull and ends up being a sizable chore to sit through. The issue seems to be that the good folks at Blumhouse obviously wanted to add their patented brand of socially conscious edginess to something that probably should have been approached as simply as possible, as a result, this “Blumhouse edge” leaves the movie tonally stranded.
If the film was supposed to be a comedy, the main themes being PTSD brought on from survivor’s guilt due to a child abduction isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs and the daytime scenes are shot in the same, drab, colour-beached tones as that other, fall-about, laugh-a-thon David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy. However, it’s not remotely scary either, with its cast of robo-critters being way too cuddly to be truly intimidating (having them be more battle damaged and rotted could have helped) and instead the movie tries to cheaply mine jump scares by suddenly HITTING YOU WITH LOUD NOISES when you least expect it. Also, why try and keep Freddy and his group a threat and then literally put him in a scene where he catches an Uber? There are many ways to merge silliness and genuine scares, but Five Nights At Freddy’s seems to not have a clue.
Another issue is the fact that the movie attempts to honour the games title by having the film take place over (you guessed it) five nights, with the evening progressively getting more sinister, but this is tough to do when on the third or fourth night, they’ve all made friends and our protagonists are building play forts with the murderous machines and it’s yet another horror film that attempts to make its villains misunderstood good guys (see Saw X or Hellraiser II) when it should be a lean, mean, scaring machine.
The cast all seem to be acting in different movies with Hutcherson giving admittedly a good, intense performance that would have been fine in a straight horror flick, but it grates terribly against Elizabeth Lail’s delivery which overshoots to far in the opposite direction by being overly campy. Still, at least Mary Stuart Masterson and Matthew Lillard understood the brief as the former delivers a memorable, wicked aunt role and the latter goes full unhinged whist wearing a yellow bunny suit which finally adds a splash of pizzazz to the dreary proceedings.
However, while those unfamiliar with the over arching history of Freddy Fazbear will no doubt find that the lore-as-plot nature of the story raises more questions than it answers, die-hard fans will no doubt be impressed about how much detail from the games has worked their way into the film. It’s just a shame that, for all its brand recognition, Fight Nights At Freddy’s comes second to the low budget, Nicolas Cage starring, Willy’s Wonderland, which amusingly dispensed with almost all characterisation and just focused on a guy fighting possessed murder-mascots over the course of one night. If there was some way to merge one with the other, we would have one hell of a horror/comedy and another great video game movie to boot, but as it stands, Five Nights At Freddy’s proves to be at least four nights too long to mull around in such boring surroundings.
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