Flasz On Film

Synopsis: A string of past murders at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza resurfaces when the haunted Marionette and a new line of “Toy” animatronics unleash chaos decades later. As Mike and his sister Abby are drawn into the mystery alongside Vanessa, the killer’s tormented daughter, they must confront the legacy of William Afton before the possessed machines claim new victims.

When I went to see Five Nights at Freddy’s back in 2023, I remember describing in my review the sense—a premonition perhaps?—that I subconsciously knew the movie wouldn’t be worth a damn before it started. Which it wasn’t. It was an unwatchable travesty.

Now, though… Fool me once—shame on you. Fool me twice? This time I did know what I was getting myself into and I did it anyway, which either means I am totally and irreparably insane according to the definition unreliably attributed to Albert Einstein, or I am a sucker for self-flagellation. Or maybe I’m a toxic optimist who thinks that maybe in spite of the overwhelming odds to the contrary, the sequel to a profoundly terrible movie directed by the same person who did the original would somehow be better.

Well, it is not. I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my head in my hands with my mouth agape in utter disbelief at just how much worse this experience was. Not only is this movie abysmal, it makes the original look like The Conjuring in comparative terms. This thing looks as though it was written by a Large Language Model and put together with just about enough forethought to ensure that A led to B and not the other way around while also carrying enough aesthetic familiarity to once again trick the fans of this video game franchise into buying a ticket. Though, judging by the fact that the original movie made three hundred million against a meager twenty million in production cost, this shouldn’t be a problem. There’s enough people out there who think it is after all a good idea to fork over their life savings in exchange for that second night at Freddy’s.

Therefore, I don’t know who I’m trying to convince here. There’s clearly a sizable contingent of fans who think that a second helping of atrociously unoriginal horror propped by hideously non-diegetic jump scares and whatever fan service this series can muster is exactly what they want out of a movie about Chuck E Cheese from hell. They likely expect the same characters to come back and find utterly anti-intellectual reasons to revisit the scene of the crime that was the first movie and get us all scared by animatronic monstrosities led by Sadako from Wish. What I will say, though, is that if you don’t feel giddy about the idea of this movie coming out or you’re too old to have been a fan of the game, you’re probably not the target demographic and you will end up watching it with your hand over your mouth, in a state of total discombobulation, fighting the primal desire to scream. Consider this a health warning.

So, between the scriptwriting that makes actual video game lore look cohesive and original, scares that are as refined as a jab with a cattle prod and performances that look undirected at best and at worst completely forced and unfocused—Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail truly look as though they were coerced into acting in this—Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 looks as though someone gave a bunch of twelve-year-olds fifty million dollars to burn and a camera, and left the building. The only two people who seemed to understand where they were and what the mission could have been are Matthew Lillard and Wayne Knight who operate at the subtle boundary between cringe and camp and give the movie an aura of ridiculousness (for the five combined minutes they are on screen) that it needed to adopt wholesale.

This is nothing than a total misfire. Unatmospheric and unserious when it wants to be scary and not ballsy enough to lean into the camp a movie like this should cultivate organically. After all, it is aimed at cohorts who might be allergic to self-awareness and authentic camp. And this is really how a movie like this could have succeeded: through ridiculousness inflated to the point of excess. It could have embodied the kind of frivolity you’d expect to find in video stores three decades ago, specifically in movies produced by guys like Charles Band or Roger Corman and maybe it would have been a cool curiosity in its own right. Not every day does it happen that a movie with a serious B-potential for amateurish bombacity can sneak its way into cinemas the way 80’s horror sequels like Jaws—The Revenge or Piranha 2 did. They also wanted to look serious and mean but they also happened to be playful and ridiculous enough to endear those who came prepared. And I just don’t think this movie has what it takes to replicate this kind of viral magic.

Instead, it is an experiment in self-inflicted torture for those who willingly leave their houses to see it. And something tells me that we are about to see more sequels headed our way too. One night at Freddy’s was enough for me to rethink my life decisions. The second outing made me want to dress in a white kimono and ritualistically disembowel myself right in full view of the audience. In sum, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a cinematic violent crime that nobody should go out and witness, let alone condone, and a prime candidate for the distinguished title of the most unwatchable dud of the year.