Five Nights at Freddy's, the Movie About Ghost Children Possessing Giant Anthropomorphic Animatronic Animals is, Shockingly, Not Good.

Whoda thunk it?

I knew what Freddy Fazbear, the ghoulish villain of Five Nights of Freddy’s, looked like before I knew who he was . That’s because the bloody take on Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place escaped the video game ghetto and became a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. 

Like Freddy Krueger, Freddy Fazbear became enormously popular with children despite behind a villain who literally murders kids within the extremely family-unfriendly entertainment that made him a pop icon. 

My son had a Freddy Fazbear Funko Pop when he was about seven years old so I ascertained through context clues that Freddy was a cross between Chuck E. Cheese and Chuck E. Manson and that Five Nights at Freddy’s was about an evil family fun-themed pizzeria where tots are disemboweled rather than entertained. 

I could see the appeal of a premise like that. Anyone who has ever been close to a singing, dancing animatronic anthropomorphic animal knows just how creepy and unintentionally scary they are. Five Nights at Freddy’s made these creatures intentionally frightening.

That’s not much of an idea that has led to not much of a movie in Five Night’s at Freddy’s, the long in the works feature film adaptation of the popular series of horror video games about ShowBiz Pizza Place’s house band The Rock-afire Explosion, only evil. Or rather, more evil. There was definitely something sinister about the Rock-afire Explosion. Rumor has it that brown bear frontman Billy Bob Brockali killed a guy in Tulsa but the corporate brass covered it up. 

Incidentally while looking up the Rock-afire Explosion I came upon these glorious sentences about vocalist Looney Bird: “Looney Bird was originally portrayed as having the personality of an alcoholic and frequently huffed gas to calm himself down. In the mid 1980s, his personality underwent a drastic change and he would be portrayed as an inventor and scientific genius.” 

Why do they have to choose? Why can’t he be an alcoholic who huffs gas to calm himself down AND an inventor and scientific genius? We all contain multitudes, Looney Bird most of all. 

Those two lines from Wikipedia will provide you with more pleasure than the 109 minutes of Five Nights at Freddy’s. 

Five Nights at Freddy’s has a lot of problems, beginning with it being one hundred and nine minutes long. That’s nearly two hours! That’s way, way, way too long for a Five Nights at Freddy’s adaptation. I know that I spent the film wishing it could have been Three Nights at Freddy’s or Two Mercifully Brief Nights at Freddy’s instead.

This speaks to another flaw: the damn title gives the whole thing away. We know that nothing too fatal or interesting will happen during the first four nights so we can’t help but wait impatiently for shit to finally go down. Then, when shit finally does go down, you wonder why they even bothered. 

Five Nights at Freddy’s would undoubtedly have felt fresher if it had hit theaters (and Peacock) before 2021’s Willy’s Wonderland and 2019’s The Banana Splits Movie, neither of which had intellectual property as hot as Five Nights at Freddy’s but both of which beat its movie adaptation to the big screen by years. 

That doesn’t seem to matter, as Five Nights at Freddy’s will apparently gross fifty million dollars its opening weekend despite being low-budget, bottom-feeding garbage.

Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t need competition to come off as hopelessly subpar; it fails on its own feeble merits. 

Josh Hutcherson is a blurry grey nothing in the thankless lead role of Mike Schmidt, a fuck-up who distractingly has the same name as a famous baseball player from my childhood. Mike loses yet another job when he attacks a man he thinks is a kidnapper but was actually just a dad while working as a mall cop. 

Mike’s unfortunate employment history keeps him from being eligible for all but the very worst jobs. We’re talking about jobs that aren’t just bad; they’re torments of the damned. 

The forgettable hero is in no place to be picky when it comes to employment but when career counselor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard, enjoying himself, as usual) offers him a poor-paying, depressing job guarding Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, an abandoned family eatery and arcade, at night, he declines. 

Mike wants to maintain custody of his spooky younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), however, so he reluctantly takes the job. 

Freddy Fazbear's Pizza is completely empty when Mike gets there for the first time. The only person he ever deals with is a police officer with a dark, predictable secrets. 

The only orientation he has is an ancient video tape from the pizzeria’s golden age that provides a brief splash of color and humor, as well as necessary exposition.

Mike figures out early on that there is something desperately wrong with Freddy Fazbear's Pizza but he needs to spend four more nights there not being dead in order for the title to make sense. 

Abby’s evil aunt wants custody of Abby so she sends some young ruffians to break into the abandoned pizzeria and get her no-account relation fired but they are predictably murdered by Freddy Fazbear and his killer associates: chicken Chica, fox Foxy and Bonnie, a rabbit with a bow tie who proves that you don’t need to be a man to murder people from beyond the grave while entrapped in the body of a giant anthropomorphic robot; women can slaughter mindlessly just as well as the fellas, if not more so. 

We’ve still got PLENTY of time to kill. One hundred and nine minutes worth, in fact! So the movie piles on unnecessary subplots and psychodrama involving the deeply depressed Mike’s guilt and confusion over not being able to keep his brother Garret from getting abducted when they were children. 

If Disney Land is the Happiest Place on Earth then Freddy Fazbear's Pizza is the Creepiest Place on the Planet. Yet that inexplicably does not keep Mike, who, unlike his namesake, is not legendary for walloping massive homers while playing third base for the Philadelphia Phillies, from bringing his spooky ass sibling to the place. 

Abby immediately makes friends with Freddy and his pals. Five Nights at Freddy’s establishes, with utterly out of place casualness, that the reason that Freddy, Chica, Foxy and Bonnie are perambulating about and seemingly sentient as well as sinister is because they’re possessed by the ghosts of the children that the restaurant’s serial killer co-founder murdered during its heyday. 

That might seem unrealistic, even implausible but Five Nights at Freddy’s actually ends with Neil LaGrasse Tyson, who served as its scientific advisor, assuring the audience that not only did everything in the movie happen; it all happened to him personally. He apparently barely survived. I’m not even sure how that’s possible but Tyson nevertheless strongly feels that Five Nights at Freddy’s is maybe the most scientifically sound movie ever made. 

If Five Nights at Freddy’s had any chance at being scary it blew it with its hilariously lame, literal-minded explanation for why Freddy Fazbear's Pizza became a realm of infinite evil. 

If you do not want the idiotic twist to Five Nights at Freddy’s spoiled stop reading now, but it’s honestly impossible to spoil a movie that has nothing to offer. 

It turns out that the career advisor from early in the film is actually the evil serial killer founder of the pizzeria AND the father of the police officer who tells Mike Schmidt all about the place and its weird vibes. 

This affords Lillard an opportunity to wildly over-act, which is fun, but this revelation is just as disappointing and anticlimactic and nonsensical as everything else in the film. 

I did quite like the character design of Freddy and his homicidal homies, however, but Five Nights at Freddy’s never does anything scary or particularly interesting with them. 

It took a very long time for Freddy to make it onto the big screen. It wasn’t worth the wait.

One Star Out of Five