Grin and Fazbear it: Frightfully fun feature fares fine
If you’re looking to take the family out for a Halloween movie this week, you could do worse than Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s rated PG-13, which already makes it more kid- friendly than most R-rated Halloween fare. The rating no doubt was purposeful, so as to allow legions of young fans access: the film is based on a hugely popular video game of the same name. I’ve never played the game, so I may not be the film’s target audience, but as a lightweight horror movie, it’s amusing enough for a mixed audience of game fans, non-fans, kids and adults. The scares are mostly fun, the gore level is mostly low, and the plot is mostly silly.
You may enjoy the movie more if you don’t overthink the plot too much and are willing to suspend a little–no, make that a lot–of disbelief, since this picture has more holes than the Augusta National Golf Club.
Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games), at risk of losing custody of his adorable younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), needs a job, stat. He takes the only thing offered by career counselor Steve (Matthew Lillard): a night shift security guard gig at a boarded up old pizza parlor called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The place is like a Chuck E. Cheese, only sadder and creepier. Naturally the weird, disquieting venue is the subject of a chilling legend involving missing and abducted children. That doesn’t sit well with poor Mike, whose own younger brother was kidnapped back when they were kids.
Unfortunately for Mike, Freddy’s is also filled with run-down and vaguely sinister animatronic characters like Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, and an especially psychotic Cupcake, who all come alive and begin to hunt our hero. Who are they? What do they want?
Mike, Abby, and a helpful cop named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, Mack & Rita) are determined to stay alive and figure out the answers. Mike is convinced that his recurring dreams of the day his brother disappeared may hold the key to the puzzle. These dream sequences are some of the film’s best, as they have a more sophisticated eeriness to them compared to the typical slasher chase scenes inside Freddy’s. And hat tip to director Emma Tammi for a particularly savvy use of the 1983 Romantics hit “Talking in Your Sleep.”
Mostly, though, this movie is the kind where a character hears something moving in a closed cabinet and instead of fleeing, decides to not only approach said cupboard, but also to open the doors to check out what’s inside. Have these characters never seen a horror movie? When has that choice ever been a smart idea?
Other burning questions you might find yourself asking include: where does an animatronic bear get cab fare? How long does someone have to be dead on your living room floor before you notice? And the big reveal of the film’s villain will come as no surprise to anyone who’s even half paying attention.
That said, though, young Piper Rubio avoids the precociousness trap and creates one of the bravest, most cheer-worthy young heroines in Abby since Millicent Simmonds’s Regan in A Quiet Place.
Mary Stuart Masterson, who for some of us will always and forever remain Eric Stoltz’s true love, plays Mike’s Aunt Jane, his custody rival for Abby. Masterson has Some Kind of… fun with the role, turning a relatively small part into a nefarious but comical wicked step-mother sort of caricature.
So come for the jump scares and stay for the endless “But why… ? But how…?” plot dissection after the movie ends. “I’m having a hard time processing everything that happened,” a character says at one point. Indeed. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I’m off cupcakes for good.
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Five Nights at Freddy’s opens today at Bay Area theaters, and is also available for streaming on Peacock.
