Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)
Directed by Emma Tammi
Recently fired and desperate for work, a troubled young man named Mike agrees to take a position as a night security guard at an abandoned theme restaurant: Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. But he soon discovers that nothing at Freddy's is what it seems.
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9 films that influenced Five Nights at Freddy's
What critics say influenced Five Nights at Freddy's
Warner Bros. originally acquired the film rights for the franchise in 2015, with the movie set to be directed by Monster House-helmer Gil Kenan.
If the low-key, character-first approach weren’t obvious from previous screenwriters attached to the project, including Monster House’s Gil Kenan and Gremlins’ Chris Columbus, it should have been put beyond doubt by the presence of Josh Hutcherson.
If the low-key, character-first approach weren’t obvious from previous screenwriters attached to the project, including Monster House’s Gil Kenan and Gremlins’ Chris Columbus, it should have been put beyond doubt by the presence of Josh Hutcherson.
The other? A climactic moment that’s basically the finale of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser but with pizza mascots.
Five Nights at Freddy’s” would be right at home on a double feature with 2019’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” It’s creepier and bloodier than this year’s “Haunted Mansion,” but nowhere near the gore of “Saw” or “Friday the 13th.
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There was The Banana Splits Movie, an oddly inappropriate Hanna-Barbera horror reboot; and Willy’s Wonderland, starring a non-verbal Nicolas Cage grunting and screaming. Five Nights At Freddy’s is better than at least one of those.
On a similar note, Matthew Lillard‘s presence as the teen-horror elder statesman is sure to warm the hearts of lovers of Scream and Scooby-Doo, bringing much needed joie de vivre (and more facial expressions than the rest of the cast combined) to the otherwise funerary proceedings.
(Zoinks! I thought, seeing Scooby-Doo’s Shaggy since 2002 in a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses.)
An episode of Scooby-Doo would make a more suitable comparison, especially given Matthew ‘Shaggy’ Lillard’s appearance as the career counsellor who sets Mike (Josh Hutcherson) up as the eponymous restaurant’s security guard.
As directed by co-writer Emma Tammi (“The Wind”), “Five Nights at Freddy's” puts a lot of stuff from the games up on the screen in the hopes that fans will live out that Leonardo DiCaprio meme from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” where he recognizes something and points at a TV.
Directed by Emma Tammi, who did fine and underrated work on her first horror feature, The Wind, there is a tangible search for meaning in this otherwise obligatory exercise in fan service.
Director Emma Tammi has shown she can more than do this with her last feature The Wind, but this film does her no favors.
Director Emma Tammi (“The Wind”) co-wrote the script with Seth Cuddeback (“Mateo”) and Scott Cawthon, the game developer who grew “Freddy’s” into a franchise of about a dozen sequels, books, and toys. The story has some unexpected depth by haunting Mike through past trauma, an emotional struggle that Hutcherson (the “Hunger Games” franchise, and “57 Seconds”) plays well.
That's shocking, chiefly because Tammi helmed the seriously scary supernatural indie The Wind, which centered on a 19th-century frontierswoman plagued by bizarre howls in the night that might just be a demon.
Director Emma Tammi’s previous horror venture The Wind was a lot more stylized and a lot more emotionally heavy, so her selection piqued my interest early on, but this odd pick ultimately rendered little more than some good visuals given Five Nights sticks to as conventional of a look as possible in its presentation.
Perhaps if the movie had fully committed to the the kid sister, Five Nights at Freddy's could have played more like the PG-13-rated creepy kid/terrifying toy romp M3GAN, which was also from Blumhouse and Universal Pictures.
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Josh Hutcherson (“The Hunger Games”) stars as Mike, a security guard who will lose custody of his little sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), if he doesn’t find a new job right away. The only available gig in town, according to his creepy career counselor (Matthew Lillard, “Scream”), is at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a theme restaurant that closed down years ago whose owner can’t bear to bulldoze it. But has Mike been hired to keep people out or to keep the evil haunted mascots in?
The film, directed by Emma Tammi, casts The Hunger Games’s Josh Hutcherson as Mike. Here, his new job is part of a last-ditch effort to keep from losing custody of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to his cartoonishly self-serving aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson).
Our hero is Mike (Josh Hutcherson, “The Hunger Games”), who as a child witnessed his little brother’s abduction. He has never gotten over it, and now he's under pressure as the sole source of support for his much younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). So Mike takes a job as night watchman at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a once-popular, now abandoned restaurant on the outskirts of town.