DOA
Get stuffed, freddy.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Director: Emma Tammi • Writer: Scott Cawthon, based on his game
Starring: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mckenna Grace
USA • 1hr 44mins
Opens Hong Kong December 4 • IIB
Grade: D
Quick question. Why is no one able to stand on their own damn feet in horror movies? Another one. Why does everyone just stand there like an asshole when they “fall” in the water and stare into the dark instead of getting out? How long do batteries last when they’ve been sitting in a diner that’s been abandoned for so long it’s growing moss? Gotta love that ol’ smack-the-side-until-it-works routine. Are kids really that dumb (actually don’t bother with that)? Okay, I know the answers to all of these as far as movie logic goes but can we stop with all of it? Can we come up with something better? If we don’t AI is just going to scrape the same shit again and again and feed the pattern of shit movie, I’m not going, make more shit movies just cheaper, I’m still not going.
It’s hard to describe the level of inane, inept, anti-interesting crime against cinema dreck on display in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, hoisted upon us by the returning duo of Emma Tammi and now solo screenwriter Scott Cawthon, who created the lore-heavy survival game. Freddy’s game fans are legion, and if any of y’all out there are digging this mess, godspeed. I’m not here to harsh your vibe. But it’s hard to believe even the most diehard of gamers are going to feel satisfied by this series of poorly lit mystery reveals, lazy jump scares and stilted storytelling sequences; this is not a movie. The reason we forgive character stupidity (see: above) is because a good horror flick is spooky, nasty, fun or some combination of all three. This sequel to the surprise 2023 (the speed with which this landed should tell you something about the care that went into it) hit is none of those.
Your face, watching this
Freddy’s 2 starts a few… weeks? months? after the events that ended with psycho child killer and Freddy’s mastermind William Afton (Matthew Lillard) getting bloodlessly crushed to death inside his rabbit suit following the reveal that the ghosts of the kids he murdered are haunting the animatronic Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza mascots. Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is no longer a security guard at the pizzeria, but he nonetheless has money to remodel his house. Oh wait, it’s crazy Aunt Jane’s house? Whatever, he’s fixing the house he and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio in an unfortunate performance) are living in. She seems entirely unfazed by the earlier lunacy, unlike William’s cop daughter Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) – the one he stabbed – who’s got a serious PTSD problem. It makes Mike and Vanessa’s budding romance awkward. Meanwhile, Abby misses her ghost buddies, and is having trouble at school with her terrible science teacher Mr Berg (Wayne Knight) who for some reason does not want her in the school’s upoming robotics contest. She gets the last laugh when paranormal reality show/site hunters Lisa (Mckenna Grace, Regretting You), Alex (Teo Briones, Final Destination: Bloodlines) and Rob (David Andrew Calvillo) activate yet more backstory from Freddy’s past, that calls back to this film’s prologue and unearths more long forgotten siblings, and looses the new-and-improved mascots (how?) by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (a high point that blows its opportunity) upon the town. Wherever that is. Don’t recall; don’t care because all of this is just set up for Freddy’s 3.
Having never played any of the holy games – Cawthon created Freddy’s after he gave up making (wait for it) zero-paying Christian video games, which goes a long way to explaining why Abby hopes her friends are in heaven – I suspect that Freddy’s 2 is more a collection of Easter (heh heh) eggs and deep cut references than a standalone story. For the minority non-players, Blumhouse has even thrown in a shout-out to mainline horror buffs by putting Lillard in a movie with Skeet Ulrich, his old Scream pal, who has a glorified cameo as Henry, the still grieving father of Freddy’s first victim in one of the film’s endless flashbacks. It doesn’t help, because Tammi still can’t wring a true scare out of the material, she can’t make us care about these dullards, and the photography by Lyn Moncrief (the underrated The Passenger) is still muddy and moodless. Even the animatronics seem to lumber from one scene to the next with bupkis in the way of verve or attitude. Chica is voiced by Megan Fox, FFS. How can a giant animatronic bear with glowing eyes and a chicken with the voice of Megan Fox not be fun or threatening? How? At one point Mike, while fiddling with the early-stage WiFi network connection that powers the animatronic monsters, says to no one – and everyone – “Who designed this?” Dude, I’m asking myself the exact same thing.