[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
About six months ago, my 9 year old started bringing home mildly disturbing teddy bear action figures. Their limbs fell apart (on purpose), and they looked vaguely menacing and grungy. They multiplied at an alarming rate – first it was just Fun Time Freddy (a classic brown bear with a top hat and a grimace), but soon there was Golden Freddy and a purple one and then a sort of run over chick, among entirely too many others, as well as books.
He talked endlessly about this video game series he loved – the characters, the lore, the minigames within, the waves of toy releases and the incentives to collect every one. He’s going as Freddy for Halloween, and he wore the costume to the movie screening – where he found his people, and they compared toys and plushies.
Watching a movie you know nothing about surrounded by it’s most ardent fans is always fun. As a reviewer – it’s also extremely helpful. The audience’s reaction provides context clues and you can feel the success of the project based on the fans gratification.
A quick primer if you haven’t been exposed to this particular obsession: Five Nights at Freddy’s (directed by Emma Tammie) is the long awaited movie adaptation of a video game that spawned a robust universe of characters and stories. It’s a riff on Chuck E. Cheese, where the animatronics (built by Jim Henson’s creature shop for the film) that creeped us out as kids come to life at night to commit light slasher movie atrocities of increasing violence over the course of five nights.
Mike (a perfectly adequate Josh Hutcherson) is haunted by dreams of his brother’s abduction, and his desperation to figure out what happened to him is negatively impacting his life. The mental anguish has made him too unstable to keep a job, and his greedy aunt is using it to her advantage to try to take custody of his younger sister (overly sweet Piper Rubio). Out of desperation, Mike takes the only job available, even though it means working nights, from the employment agent (an always welcome and forever scene-stealing Matthew Lillard). Mike begins work as the night security guard at the abandoned and defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where he meets a concerned police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, playing the exact one note she uses in every other role she’s been in), who is oddly familiar with the place.
The set up is slow, but the fans love that lore. The plot is unique (although the mystery is solvable in the first third), and as it revealed itself I began to understand why these off-putting characters appeal to these kids so much. It’s the Home Alone of horror movies, providing kids agency against the really scary things that go bump in the night. Imagine if Barney had claws and teeth – sweetness and manners only go so far to keep little humans safe.
This is not a great movie of any genre – the acting is a bummer, the plot is overly complicated, and the use of a Republica song is just weird. But it’s not scary, either. The PG-13 rating hamstrings it’s attempts at being more than a collection of odd jump scares. A PG-13 horror movie is… uncommon. A quick search of IMDb indicated about 350 released in the US since 1980, compared to over 2,200 rated R. Because a PG-13 horror movie is… kind of lame.
The best PG-13 horror movies are primarily psychological to serve their genre, and that’s not an option here. The bloody visuals from the game are kept fast and mild in the movie – exactly the right choice for the intended audience. But not scary.
Several times during the movie the crowd around me cheered for reasons I did not understand. They were delighted by deep cut characters, video game mechanic references, and members of their fan community. I was fortunate to have my own ScareBear (my moniker for the FNAF fans, which got a gentle eye roll when I suggested it, but I like it) with me to be my enthusiastic guide. And he loved every minute of it. This is a good movie for the fans, and the rest of us can enjoy them enjoying it.
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