“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” - A real groaner.

What’s the over/under on how much more money Blumhouse Productions can squeeze out of the FNaF film turd? $200 million? $300 million? For those of you who aren’t part of the cult following of FNaF games, FNaF stands for Five Nights at Freddy’s. For those of you who are part of the cult, know that I hate you all a little bit right now. Because you all spent $297 million to see the first quite bad FNaF film (which was made for a paltry $20 million), a sequel was made. And since you all will probably spend a similar amount to see the somehow-much-worse Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, there’s going to be at least one more rock-bottom-fifty-feet-of-crap-then-us sequel that I’m going to begrudgingly sit through.

Yes, Five Nights at Freddy’s was a turd of a film. I said even the fanboys should ask for seventeen dollars back and the only reason I didn’t include it as one of the worst movies of the year in 2023 was because the animatronics were at least visually interesting. Freddy’s 2 gets no such consolation, managing even to make the animatronics worse.

Freddy’s 2 begins with a scene set back in 1982, featuring a young girl named Charlotte at a birthday party at the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. She witnesses a boy being snatched by someone in a Freddy suit and is disdainfully dismissed by practically every parent in the building as she frantically tries to tell them what she saw. Finding no help, she attempts to rescue the boy herself and ends up stabbed and dying in front of those same parents who still barely care that a girl bleeds to death in the arms of a marionette animatronic. Everything about this scene is executed terribly, is completely unbelievable from a storytelling perspective, and is but a small taste of the shit sandwich the audience is forced to swallow for the next ninety minutes.

Flash forward to a about a year after the events of the first film (twenty years after Charlotte’s death) where we meet back up with the three survivors of the first film, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). After an awkward date between Mike and Vanessa, followed by an even more awkward conversation between them at Mike’s house, interspersed with Abby constantly whining that she wants to see her dead kid friends again, I realized how much I disliked all three of them. The film seemed to go out of its way to make the audience wonder if maybe Vanessa’s serial killer father (Matthew Lillard) was right.

Meanwhile, the security guard (Freddy Carter) at the original Freddy’s invites and escorts a trio of ghost hunters in to explore the dilapidated restaurant. Led by Lisa (Mckenna Grace), the three quickly split up to check out various areas. Lisa’s partners are quickly dispatched and Lisa is possessed by Charlotte. Not even trying to hide his glee or obvious ill intentions, the security guard leaves after watching the possession happen.

This scene is nearly as bad as the opening flashback, but for different reasons. The two murders are as bloodless and sanitized as Charlotte’s murder, reinforcing how very, very PG-13 this movie is. It blows the identity of the non-supernatural villain well prior to the film’s sad and half-hearted reveal in the climax. And it completely wastes Mckenna Grace, who is de-possessed a short while later, her dead body left in a storage room.

At this point, it seemed as if the movie had abandoned the entire premise of the murder bots. That’s not to say they aren’t still in the movie, but they really don’t do much. After Charlotte escapes the restaurant, she sends the bots to kill the parents from that 1982 birthday party. In an attempt to stop them, non-evil Mike stays at Freddy’s, working on the computer to try to disconnect the bots’ network connections. Bet you weren’t expecting a major plot point being disconnecting a router.

There are far more terrible components to this movie - Wayne Knight playing an asshat science teacher, to name one. But perhaps the worst component was also the only one that elicited an actual audible reaction from the audience. At one point, Abby is possessed by Charlotte and Mike exorcises Charlotte by playing a music box at her that Charlotte’s dad (Skeet Ulrich) gave her. As Charlotte (now in marionette form for some reason) slithers away, Mike puts the music box away. The entire audience, myself included, let out a collective “why are you putting it away?!” groan. But does Charlotte coming flying back into Abby? Or into any of the humans? And shouldn’t Abby be dead like Lisa? Don’t be absurd.

That groan nicely sums up this laughably atrocious film. Like the last film, this film has no idea what it wants to be. Screenwriter Scott Cawthon and director Emma Tammi have now made two films with no entertainment value, confusing and nonsensical storytelling, bland and shallow characters, and barely any scares (and a paltry five wildly uncreative kills). And to top it off, the movie ends with an actual cliffhanger, figuratively slapping the audience in the face as if to say “you’ll eat your shit sandwich and like it.”

Rating: Ask for everyone’s money back and remember to give the stink eye to the cult followers that don’t ask for their money back.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” - Zoinks.

When I was a kid, one of my television staples was Scooby-Doo. I always enjoyed how Scooby and the gang would get chased around by ghosts or witches while trying to solve whatever mystery they had been asked to solve. I didn’t care for the end of each episode, since the reveal of the villain always took away the supernatural part of the mystery, but the episodes as a whole were always fun. Five Nights at Freddy’s is essentially an episode of Scooby-Doo, except for being short one Great Dane with the munchies.

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is living a bit of a tough life. He works as a mall security guard, takes care of his adolescent sister Abby (Piper Rubio), is fighting off his greedy Aunt Jane for custody of Abby, and believes he can use his dreams to identify the person who, years earlier, abducted his younger brother Garrett. After getting fired from his job for assaulting a man at the mall he thought was kidnapping a kid, he visits career counselor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard) for job prospects. After initially refusing a job as night security guard at the dilapidated and abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza because Mike can’t work nights, Mike accepts the position to stave off Aunt Jane.

If you have played any of the Five Nights at Freddy’s games, you realize the previous paragraph describes something very, very loosely based on the game. Which makes sense. The game is nothing more than a night security guard trying to survive a night in the pizzeria while murderous animatronics kill any humans they find. To describe that plot as a bit thin is to say the ocean is a bit damp. Movies generally need more plot than that, though the John Wick franchise begs to differ.

For all you FNaF (this is the only time I will ever use that awful acronym) fans worried the film won’t lean into the game’s premise, you can relax. Freddy’s opens with Mike’s predecessor at Freddy’s being slaughtered by your favorite murder-bots. A little while later, we’ll watch a bunch of thugs - hired by Aunt Jane to trash the place in an attempt to get Mike fired - meet their PG-13 ends. Yeah, sorry, this film is rated PG-13, so don’t expect to actually see any grisly murders or bloodshed. Mike will also spend some time hiding and running from the bots, but a lot less than time you hope.

During Mike’s first night, he spends the majority of his time napping in his continual effort to plumb his dreams for Garrett’s abductor. However, the dream is different than usual. Five children he’s never seen before show up, confusing Mike. Mike assumes the kids saw the abductor, but when he starts to ask them about it, they all run away. On night two, the same thing happens, but when he gets close to the children, they attack him. He wakes up with a gash on his arm, pointed out to him by police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). After Vanessa treats the wound, she shows him around the restaurant while telling him that Freddy’s closed after five children were murdered there. Between that and the fact that Mike’s dreams have been invaded by those same five children, we’ve got a supernatural murder mystery. Please pass the Scooby-snacks.

In a confounding decision by the writers, night three features Abby befriending the murder-bots and introducing them to Mike. Night four is even sillier, as Mike, Abby, and Vanessa build a table and chair fort with the bots, basically having a slumber party with them. What is happening? This isn’t scary at all. We are deep into Mystery Machine territory at this point.

In its closing act, the movie heads toward its fifth and final night. I appreciate that the five nights Mike spends at Freddy’s happens organically rather than because of some contrived deadline or curse. What I don’t appreciate is how predictably the final act plays out due to either poor acting, directing, or writing. One or more of those is responsible for Vanessa behaving suspiciously in literally every scene she’s in. Ditto for Steve Raglan in his one scene up to this point. And since we learn that the robots are possessed by the ghosts of the five murdered children, we know they can’t be acting on their own. All that’s left now is for the killer to be unmasked. And yes, the real killer will be unmasked, and yes, it happens because of those meddling kids.

From what I heard from other audience members after the film concluded was that the film featured a ton of callbacks and easter eggs for the fans. And they seemed to be happy with it. For those of us that aren’t fanboys, we were less than thrilled. The film never commits to anything. It’s kind of a slasher flick, except it’s also kind of a kid’s movie, except it might be a murder mystery. Regardless of which, it was also a depressing film. A film about murderous Country Bear / Chuck-E-Cheese / Show-Biz analogues should be fun, if not funny, to watch. Freddy’s definitely did not have a sense of humor that it was aware of, though it is unintentionally funny that Lillard’s career has become almost entirely comprised of Scooby-Doo work (eleven films and fifty-two television episodes in the last six years). Zoinks is right.

Rating: You should ask for seventeen dollars back...even if you are fanboy.