Can you survive five nights?
The film follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.
The terrifying horror game phenomenon becomes a blood-chilling cinematic event, as Blumhouse— the producer of M3GAN, The Black Phone and The Invisible Man— brings Five Nights at Freddy’s to the big screen. The film’s iconic animatronic characters will be created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
What We Thought:
The more you know about the video game franchise that is Five Nights at Freddy’s the more likely you are to enjoy the movie version of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Not only have I never played any of the games, I literally know nothing about the games, its storylines or characters. I got very little out of the actual film, but it has some positives I’ll get to.
Because I’m not familiar with the games I have no idea how similar the movie is to them. The basis seems right from what I was told, a guy takes a job as a security guard at a closed, family friendly restaurant-entertainment place, think Chuck E Cheese’s. That’s sort of what this movie is about. It also adds in a kidnapped brother backstory and an Autistic sister although I don’t believe they actually call her Autistic. Josh Hutcherson plays the guy hired to be the security guard and he takes pills to dream more while sleeping as he tries to remember what happened to his brother when they were kids. His sister comes across as being on the spectrum and talks to her imaginary friends while their aunt fights him for custody over her. I’m thinking this stuff might have been made up for the film, but I have no idea.
That’s my biggest complaint with the movie, there is so much going on from all sides, what on Earth are we supposed to be rooting for? Hutcherson takes the job because he needs money to support his sister or the aunt will take her. There’s a babysitter helping the aunt sabotage the situation. Throughout the movie Hutcherson is trying to remember enough of the camping trip that his brother was kidnapped at. All the while these creepy animatronic characters at this rundown place might be murdering people and trying to kill Hutcherson. Why is there so much going on at once?
And it’s a shame so much is happening because the animatronic puppets are very cool and the horror elements genuinely worked for me. For a PG-13 film they definitely pushed the envelope in how far they were willing to go for scares and gore. If the entire movie was about this place killing people while a security guard fights to survive, it would have been awesome. There’s a cop character that knows some secrets and overall that element works as it all gets explained in the end, but so much of the film is spent wandering needlessly outside of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria with unnecessary characters and side stories.
Five Nights at Freddy’s should open really well at the box office despite also streaming on Peacock day & date. Even though I might not have gotten much out of it as a whole, the crowd I saw it with loved it. There are cameos in it that erupted the crowd and I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Fans liking it a lot more than me is perfectly fine with me. I liked the animatronics especially the horror elements of it because there are scenes that come across as body horror which is fun. I liked the creepiness of the location and even the surprise twist that you probably should figure out if you’re paying attention still worked for me. Unfortunately so much time is wasted on things that really don’t matter by the end and it feels like other movies (The Black Phone came to mind for a few of us talking after the movie). I see it making enough money for the sequel to be greenlit by the end of the weekend because the games provide plenty of other storylines to turn into movies.
Genre: Horror
Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Kat Conner Sterling and Piper Rubio, with Mary Stuart Masterson and Matthew Lillard
Directed by: Emma Tammi
Written by: Scott Cawthon, Emma Tammi, Seth Cuddeback, based on the video game series created by Scott Cawthon
Producers: Jason Blum, Scott Cawthon
Executive Producers: Bea Sequeira, Russell Binder, Marc Mostman, Christopher H. Warner
The Nerds Templar 