One Night Too Many
Why is this even a thing?
Five nights at Freddy’s
Director: Emma Tammi • Writers: Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback, Emma Tammi
Starring: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kat Conner Sterling, Lucas Grant
USA • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong October 26 • IIA
Grade: C-
Video game to movie adaptations have a crap reputation for a reason. Most of them suck beyond belief. But even the most inane adaptations will hint at what the end goal of the source material is. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is hot garbage but you can watch it and kind of get what Mario’s mission is. Michael Fassbender couldn’t help the trash heap of Assassin’s Creed but it was clear what was going on. The objective of Mortal Kombat – both the original and the 2021 remake – was clear, and ditto for the superior Silent Hill, The Witcher and the new gold standard, The Last of Us. Good or bad, the point of the game is right there. Not so in Emma Tammi’s Five Nights at Freddy’s. What the point of the game is (if there was one) is completely lost in the film and if the movie was created with an eye towards moving more game units this is an epic fail. On every level. It’s a rare thing indeed when a movie is so bland, so unremarkable, so middling you can’t even hate it.
If you’re not a player, Five Nights is based on the 2014 video game (and now multimedia IP) by Scott Cawthon (once a Christian game creator), who’s also co-writer here, and falls somewhere between Sausage Party and Night at the Museum. Okay, it’s less dirty than Sausage Party but it pivots on products coming to life after hours. As a standard low cost Blumhouse special (this one cost a paltry US$20 million) it’s likely to make a boatload of money, but it will forever remain completely and utterly without anything to say. And to add insult to injury, if you’re looking for a Halloween night scare notice it’s IIA. Nothing rated IIA is every truly scary.
Worst. Cop. Ever
Peeta Mellark, alias Josh Hutcherson, plays Mike Schmidt, an almost unemployable dude down on his luck, dealing with some kind of family trauma and raising his little sister, Abby (Piper Rubio, sadly quite terrible), on his own. On the advice of his shady AF job counsellor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard, and if his casting doesn’t give away the rest of the film, you need to get out more) Mike takes an awful gig as the night security guard at the derelict Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a kid-friendly food and game emporium. He has to because his wealthy (?) aunt, Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), is trying to get custody of Abby. Why is not quite clear, but she’s so determined she’s got a man on the inside – Mike’s babysitter Max (Kat Conner Sterling) – to set Mike up to fail. Meanwhile, strange things start happening at Freddy’s on Mike’s watch, and when he’s forced to take Abby along to work one night, he finds the animatronic animals – Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and Carl the Cupcake – that delighted the rugrats when the place was open come to life. There’s a dark secret about Freddy’s closure, the spectre of missing kids, and the most uselessly cryptic, and just plain useless, sheriff’s deputy of all time, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) hanging around to give Mike dire warnings she never explains.
It should be noted that the problems with Five Nights at Freddy’s have very little to do with the creepy animatronic puppets created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop. The studio has contributed solid work on that front, and when Freddy Fazbear finally makes his threatening appearance it’s as ominous as it can be for IIA/PG-13. So it’s a shame that crew’s work is enveloped by leaden performances, stretches in logic, and otherwise pedestrian visuals. And when I say “stretches in logic” I’m not being some numbnut that demands realistic space/time/physics in horror. Can’t we just have some internal logic? Build your world and make it make sense to itself is all I ask.
Five Nights is probably loaded with easter eggs and all sorts of goodies for players, and that’s fine; there are also cameos by gaming YouTubers CoryxKenshin, 8-Bit Ryan, Baz, Razzbowski, Dawko, and FusionZGamer. But devoid of any narrative tension or any reason to give a shit about these people – Mike seems less PTSD as just a dick, and Vanessa is potentially aiding and abetting a crime with her ineptitude – the film falls on its back and flails like an animatronic turtle trying to get right side up. There are better choices out there, old and new, for spooky viewing this week. Check out the way under-the-radar Canadian chiller The Changeling, or see if Back Home is lingering in theatres, or hit Netflix for its annual Mike Flanagan creep-out, The Fall of the House of Usher, or watch the documentary The Corporation, which examines whether or not a corporate body, when viewed as an entity, is a psychopath. Now that shit’s truly terrifying. — DEK
*Five Nights at Freddy’s was reviewed during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labour of the actors it wouldn't exist.