Five Nights At Freddy's

When a troubled young man, struggling to support his family, begins working as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, an abandoned, rundown blight of an old ‘80s family fun center, he soon realizes that a lot more than just old food and memories of better times have gone bad at Freddie’s…

Five Nights at Freddy’s is a family-friendly horror film that is based not only off a video game, but also the fact that the Chucky E. Cheese franchise was gross and super creepy, especially the super creepy animatronic robot band.

Fun fact, Chuck E. Cheese’s legal name is Charles Entertainment Cheese.

Josh Hutcherson, from the phenomenal and criminally under-appreciated tv show Future Man, plays Mike. Mike lives in a shitty middle American suburb somewhere in the Midwest maybe, a place of dirty canals and closed businesses, where the jobs have all left and are never coming back, and the half-empty mall is all finger-smudged and grimy and surrounded by weed-choked parking lots, where there’s nothing but street after street of ugly, rundown tract homes, with their overgrown, trash-filled yards, each one just the same as the last, except for the ones that are burnt down. Mike is always one paycheck away from the street, under-educated, without support, and struggling with mental health issues, he is always on the edge of unemployment, all the trauma of a younger brother who was kidnapped years ago and never found, a dead mother, an absent father, and the responsibility of raising his young sister, Abby, as his sneering harridan of aunt circles them both like a vulture, looking to take Abby away, all in order to get her monthly government support check, almost too much to bear. To cope, Mike is obsessed with his nightly dreams of his brother’s kidnapping, he takes sleeping pills to return to them every night, always hoping to remember some long suppressed details, anything, in a hunt for answers as to what happened on that day… dreams that seem to be stronger on the nights when he’s working as the security guard in the old broken-down restaurant.

But… that might be due to the monstrous, old, cobbled-together, terminator-like animatronic robot animal characters that haunt the place, possessed by the ghosts of dead children, who now come to life in order to kill any trespassers…

In fact, maybe the two things are connected.

Maybe.

I can appreciate the attempt to make an old-fashioned family-fun horror film like Gremlins, or… Gremlins 2… and Five Nights at Freddy’s certainly has the right pieces needed to make a good Amblin-style kid horror film, except for maybe good dialogue and decent characters. It does have some tense moments, and a couple of good jump scares too, but it’s just too hesitant to commit to its set-up, and to unsure of which answers it wants to dole out for this movie, and which ones it wants to hold onto for the potential sequels. Somehow both too fast and too slow, this is yet another film with way too much build-up, and as a result, a lot of the more important things plot-wise get glossed over, which only weakens the movie as the plot thins.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is big solid meh.