5 Nights at Freddy’s (2023)
a review by Evan Landon
Let's just start off with this: LOL
I fucking love it when those big budget movies get taken down by a low to mid-budget horror movie. Gone are the days when just because you light your money on fire in front of the audience that they will show up in droves to watch what can only be described by Martin Scorcese as “theme parks” and “not cinema” to which I completely agree.
Let's not start considering this one any better just yet though. It is definitely more of an amusement park ride than any Transformers or Marvel movie could possibly hold a light to Goodfellas or The Departed on. Why? Let's break that down then, shall we...
Five Nights at Freddy's is a pc game from 2014 that spurned from a christian, family-friendly game called “Chipper & Sons Lumber Company” where the characters scared the players because they looked like “scary animatronic animals” and the developer, Scott Cawthorn, had a brilliant idea to make a scary horror game using the same algorithm. Genius level shit, right there.
Carrying on for three more games, the game focused on a security guard who finds himself working overnight at a Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese knock-off called “Freddy's Fazbear's Pizza” featuring animatronic animals playing songs for children whilst eating subpar pizza, sodas, and playing 8-bit arcade games. I was a Showbiz Pizza kid, myself. It was the first time I had been introduced to dry ice because some of the savvy motivated personnel decided to leave it out for a 4 year-old to pick up. Let's just say that it didn't go very well, but it probably had more gore than Five Nights at Freddy's did.
For a point and click computer game, you never got any character development; instead, if you were not paying attention to how close the evil animatronics were approaching the security room via monitors, you would get run up on with a wonderful jump scare. We see a lot more movies based on video games these days which could be the next biggest fad since comic book movies do not seem to have the same appeal that they used to, but one thing that has always hindered that genre has been the writing. You can see how difficult it was to come up with a story for Double Dragon when all you got from the game was a girl gets captured, then you and your brother go around kicking random people. It's up to a writer or team of writers to fill in the blanks while staying true to whatever that game was even about.
That brings me to my biggest gripe about this movie: the plot. Like I said, there isn't really one from the game to destroy, but the one they shoehorned in tries too hard and not hard enough which is almost admirable in its failure. The characters are so dry to where the writers want you to care about them just for the fact that it's a story about a dysfunctional family dynamic that an older brother is going to lose custody of his sister if he can't hold down a job because their aunt wants the custody payments. To be honest, with the age difference and stakes, it would have made more sense if it was his daughter. His career counselor then sends him to be a security guard at Freddy's, there is a mysterious cop who may or may not be letting on what she knows, and some kids who the aunt hires to break in just for a body count that makes no sense either to round out the actors. Matthew Lillard and Mary Stuart Masterson are completely unrecognizable and wasted on this.
Yeah, that's really all I wish to remember about it.
Again, I think it's great to see a low budget movie like this one fair better than The Flash, The Marvels, Ant-Man: Quantumania, or Indiana Jones: Dial of Dysentary, but I would have felt the same way if it was any movie that didn't spend over $200 million dollars instead of giving either what fans want or have some weird agenda hiding behind those dollar signs.
Congrats to Jason Blum and director Emma Tammi for pulling in over $200 million against a $20 million budget and it's still in theaters! That's a success any way you spell it.
2 out of 5