Flasz On Film

Do you sometimes get that tingling sensation in the back of your neck, as though your own body was letting you know something terrible was about to happen? Well, I felt that on the way to see Five Nights at Freddy’s. So, let it be a warning to us all: you should never ever disregard this feeling. Because your body knows best, it turns out.  

I started to realize a travesty was about to unfold when I noticed in the opening credits a line of text stating that the movie was based on a series of video games, which was a surprise to me. And it immediately filled me with utter dread because I have yet to see a video game adaptation that is worth its weight in salt, so let’s just say that both the bar for what this movie needed to achieve to succeed and the ceiling for what it could achieve were set extremely low.  

Thus, the movie (directed and co-written by Emma Tammi) opened with a scene in which a security guard at a mall (that’s Mike, the protagonist of the film played by Josh Hutcherson – Peeta Mellark himself) tackled a guy and beat the living poop out of him, as he thought the man had kidnapped a little boy. Cut to not a police station, an inside of a court room or a prison cell, which is where Mike should have landed himself, but to a career advice bureau run by Matthew Lillard who seems strangely obsessed with giving Mike a second chance by offering him a job as a night watchman… which Mike dismisses immediately because he has to care for his young sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But he eventually takes the job because he must be able to pay the bills and defend his family from who could easily be Cruella DeVille (that’s Aunt Jane played by Mary Stuart Masterson).  

Anyway, he takes the job of watching over a decrepit old restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a once family-friendly Chuck E. Cheese rip-off joint that is now in complete disrepair and where night watchmen frequently end up missing. And that’s because the animatronic animals, who used to be the centrepieces of in-house entertainment, come alive at night and hunt down whoever seems to be in the building. And by the way, I am told this is more or less the plot of the video game series, which Mike is about to re-enact as he must survive at work by evading fuzzy animatronics.  

Oh, I almost forgot and it’s important: Mike is also obsessed with the idea of exploring his dreams and traumatic memories of his young brother being abducted, so he deliberately takes sleeping pills at work while animatronic animals are running around hacking and slashing. But that’s not the end of the story either, because Mike is eventually told by a beautiful local police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) that the animatronics are actually possessed by ghosts of children abducted and murdered by a local Freddy Krueger wannabe or something. Look, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the two things are connected, alright? Point is that Mike needs to figure out how to stay alive, get some closure and stop his terribly cliché-laden dreams and make sure nothing happens to his sister Abby, because – naturally – she ends up involved in this mess as well.  

Look, there is no dancing around it and I have delayed this moment for a few too many paragraphs by delving into the synopsis for no good reason – Five Nights at Freddy’s is a borderline unwatchable pile of braindead clichés that has the mental acuity of a lobotomized episode of South Park and an aesthetic subtlety of the Tesla Cybertruck. It’s godawful and I can only give myself a pat on the back for not storming out of the cinema after the first twenty minutes.  

I honestly don’t know what this film’s ambition is. Was it supposed to be a horror? Well then, it ain’t scary or violent enough to stand amid other recent entries in the genre. Was it supposed to be funny? It’s not working either. Wait! Maybe it’s supposed to be campy and stuff? Nope! Wrong again! It’s just an offensively bad movie that doesn’t have a scintilla of an interesting idea to proceed with. And that may be because either the people pulling the strings never had enough brain cells to rub together or because the material they were adapting constrained their original thinking. Which is possible because from what I gather, the video games are not necessarily story-driven and their main point of interest lies in their kid-friendly jump-scariness.  

Maybe that’s it! Perhaps Five Nights at Freddy’s is supposed to be a child-friendly horror jaunt in the spirit of Goosebumps, which wouldn’t bode well because Goosebumps wasn’t particularly great either. And even in this regard, the filmmakers may have failed altogether because the BBFC rated the film as a 15, which effectively eliminates any possibility of taking your kids to see this. And they are right, by the way, because it would have been a bit too much for younger audiences in terms of intensity and violence levels. And on a personal note, I think showing a movie this bad to kids under twelve should be seen as child abuse anyway.  

Therefore, let the record state that Five Nights at Freddy’s is a travesty that makes The Exorcist: Believer, It Lives Inside and Cobweb look half-decent. Its narrative exploits are just as messy as its direction is palpably dismal. And don’t even get me started on the acting. I shudder. I have seen some truly bad movies, but this is one of those (like Ghost Stories from a few years ago) that tested my patience and brought me to the brink. It’s a bin juice-lathered pile of garbage that should never be seen by anyone and the funny thing is that as I am writing this, something in my head tells me that it’s not the end of the story because the video game series is a cash cow with a fan base, so I can only expect sequels to make landfall in the foreseeable future. Which I will gladly skip and instead choose to watch the episode of Dexter’s Laboratory where they went to Chubby Cheese and Dexter lost his glasses. In fact, I’ll gladly watch this cartoon on a loop for as long as it would take to watch any and all sequels to this aggressively and stupendously horrible film. Just to make a point.  

Now, can I please have a film adaptation of Supaplex? Surely, it can’t be worse than this pile of doo-doo…