What appears as a fun robotic slasher lark turns out to be a deathly dull rip-off of various trauma-based horror yarns which fails to deliver in either the serious or silly stakes.
While at a press screening of Emma Tammi’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, during one of the many, many scenes of Josh Hutcherson slumped over looking very glum, I noticed a fellow audience member lean over to the girl sitting next to him, point up at the screen and whisper into her ear, “That’s trauma.” Hot on the heels of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, trauma is now its own character, and here it’s used as a way to imbue a paper thin horror conceit with a bit of emotional heft.
Which was not what the early trailers suggested. The film was being sold as a short, sharp cavalcade of nostalgic fun set under vintage games arcade lighting and in the musty fug of an expired fast food outlet. The Freddy of the title is a malevolent animatronic teddy bear who fronts a band of similarly-built woodland cuddlies who are intent on butchering anyone who enters onto the premises of their long-shuttered family restaurant.
Although based on a strangely popular tween-focused videogame series from the early ’10s, these wired-for-sound critters also appear to be inspired by the real-life robotic band The Rock Afire Explosion from the defunct mini-chain, ShowBiz Pizza. One thing that lets the film down instantly is the exceptionally poor creature design, with no real feel for what makes these robotic beings seem so inherently creepy. Every member of The Rock Afire Explosion looks terrifying, and not once did any of their members display a yen for murder.
Otherwise, the film falls flat due to the fact that it’s a tonal disaster zone. It’s like paying entry to a funfair only to find out you’ve wandered into an open counselling session which is being led by a slipshod college undergraduate. Plot holes the size of extra-large pizza-pies abound as Hucherson’s angular burnout Mike takes a job as night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza (no mention of the timeframe!) in a bid to retain custody of his younger sister (and sole living family member), Abby (Piper Rubio).
Yet Mike suffers from the internal scars of witnessing his younger brother being abducted from a family camping holiday, but is channelling his memory of the event through dreams, convinced he can solve the mystery by simply nodding off. And watching this film, you totally understand his desire for sleep, as director Tammi and the writing team foreground lots of bargain basement child abduction shenanigans ripped off from stories like Stephen King’s It…, while you’re gnawing at your knuckles wondering when the killer robots will actually get to do something interesting.
As an agile production outfit, Blumhouse punches out horror quickies fast, cheap and in massive quantities. On the evidence of the woefully bad Five Nights at Freddy’s, brand loyalty has reached a pivot point where the need to produce a quality – or even passably coherent – work has been undercut by the knowledge that enough people will blindly turn out to make the numbers work. People complain that Hollywood has cut its ties with mid-budget quality filmmaking, and dreck like this is the reason why.
And at time of writing, there’s much kerfuffle among the film criterati regarding the supposedly inflated runtime of the new Martin Scorsese picture, Killers of the Flower Moon. At an unnecessarily epic 1 hour and 49 minutes, the thrill-neutral Five Nights at Freddy’s makes Marty’s laconic opus feel like a Daffy Duck cartoon by comparison. With very few scares, no finesse, a dull setting, delusions of child psychology grandeur, endless poe-faced expositional back-and-forths, and all the narrative sophistication of a particularly bad episode of Scooby Doo, this one is a big, dumb, cynical miss.
Published 25 Oct 2023
The trailer makes this one look like a lot of fun.
Completely incoherent, even for a supernatural horror movie.
A wasted opportunity – nobody involved has a feel for the material.
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