Five Nights at Freddy's
Five Nights at Freddy's
How to make sense of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” a family-friendly horror thriller about a security guard who discovers and must defend himself from a gang of creepy animal robots? “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was adapted from the popular video games by three co-writers: series creator Scott Cawthon, director Emma Tammi, and Scott Cuddeback. It’s pretty bloody for a PG-13-rated horror movie, though it’s probably not as grisly as you might expect if you’ve played the games. Tammi's movie also spans 110 minutes, which might surprise viewers given how fast-paced and over-edited many scenes are.
But none of this will surprise the games’ fans, who are presumably familiar with the movie’s eerie tone and still-expanding meta-narrative. Yet while there’s enough ambient dread in this “Five Nights at Freddy’s” feature to indicate why the video games are so popular, there’s more by-the-numbers plotting than needed. Tammi's “Five Nights at Freddy’s” often feels like a pre-teen dream of what a horror movie should be, full of incidental details that tease deeper and stranger avenues to be explored in future spinoffs. If you like the games, you like poking around the characters’ world and learning about their backstories, which have grown exponentially stranger and more elaborate after various sequels and side project expansions. The movie’s main story is anemic by comparison, though it’s still sturdy enough, given its creators’ diligent attention to familiar dialogue and story beats. Security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) agrees to watch over Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a family-friendly pizzeria and video game arcade that shut down in the 1980s after some mysterious child disappearances. Mike would rather not work the night shift at a decrepit “Chuck E. Cheese”-type entertainment center, as he tells the friendly but mysterious cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). Then again, Mike’s job prospects are slim, and he needs money to keep custody of his sister Abby (Piper Rubio). If Mike doesn’t stay employed, his scheming aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) will take Abby away just to collect child support checks. Mike also suffers from recurring lucid nightmares about the abduction of his young brother Garrett (Lucas Grant); these dreams only grow more troubling and vivid while he’s employed at Freddy’s. Also, the pizzeria’s singing animal robots sometimes come alive at night and might be possessed by ghosts.
DOWNLOAD LINKS
Comments