Five Nights at Freddy's (Film) Review

"Five Nights at Freddy's," Universal's and Blumhouse's latest venture, is not only based on the popular video game franchise, which is unplayed by me, but also is clearing up house at the box office. It's made something like over a hundred million dollars, which is crazy when you realize it debuted day-and-date with Universal's own streamer Peacock. That means even more people have watched this. 

And that's a shame. All those people spending all that time when they could have gone outside, gone on a walk, breathed in some fresh air- not to mention save a few bucks. The human body was not designed to passively absorb all these cynic innuendos and dour imagery. There's birds chirping to hear; leaves to watch being blown in the wind, so much else to do. And digital entertainment does not need to be so... blah. There's enough of that in the world already.

I have only the faintest idea what the games this movie is based on are about, except that it's about possessed animatronics in a long-abandoned "Chuck E Cheese"-esque pizza parlor. I've watched gameplay of it, the first game anyway I think, and with that bare bones narrative (or what I saw in the brief footage), there's a lot more plot here than I excepted. Maybe it's all in the manual...

It's supposed to be scary, which it isn't, but because of that, I can't in good faith discuss much about the story, but here's the basics: Josh Hutcherson plays Mike, the deadbeat elder brother of Abby, played by Piper Rubio, after their parent's off screen demise. We see him lose his job as a mall security early on due to the convenience of the script, and their evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants to gain full custody. Why? For the monthly checks, Mike believes, but her character is a complete cartoon, vindictive for no reason other than to drive the story along.

So far, there isn't anything necessarily awful about the plot, but the backstory behind Mike is his addiction to sleeping pills. Why is he addicted? So he can dream the same dream about the day his little brother was kidnapped and never seen again. His goal is to remember "who" the abductee is, and his obsession makes up about his entire character arc. Child abuse is a nasty subject for slick entertainment, but wait, there's more! One night while on his new job running security guard at Freddy's, he meets Vanessa, played by Elizabeth Lail, who always seems to know more about the place than she should. She explains that in the 80s, several children went missing there, and their souls live inside the giant, moving, murderous puppets. It's just... all so unpleasant.

A lot of criticism can be directed at her character, as she randomly changes tone, at one point threatening to shoot Mike. What's her problem!? I'd tell you, but I'm not sure the movie even knows.

This is such a disjointed, mess of a movie that it feels like a sort of companion piece to Blumhouse's equally dreadful and equivalently awkward "Halloween Ends," where people die movie deaths betwist plotholes and some extremely clumsy exposition. Not too long into the runtime, the evil aunt hires some local goons to trash Freddy's, so that Mike may lose him job and help her gain custody, but it's just an excuse for some very PG-13 violence. Vanessa then tells Mike about the break-in, who proceeds to cleanup the place. Yeah, not like it's an active crime scene or anything.

Totally Killer Review

It's almost Halloween, which means it's time for all the streaming services to drop some low-rent horror film unceremoniously. This week sees Amazon Prime releasing "Totally Killer," a slasher-comedy that also happens to be an 80's set time-travel movie. It's a lot of leftover ideas from other films, but it's mercifully better than the app's last year horror-comedy, and also 80's set, "My Best Friend's Exorcism."

"Totally Killer" isn't bad but it's more amusing than clever, and boy does it want to be clever. The time-travelling narrative immediately complicates the plot, as it has to work around the butterfly effect, but it cops out when teenage Lauren (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), as opposed to adult Lauren (Kimberly Huie), says that there are multiple time-travel theories. I mean, she's right, since it doesn't exist (or does it?), but come on man! If the film was really good it wouldn't matter. That, or it'd have an actual answer.

Anyway, the plot: Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) is your average present-day teenager who's mom Pam (Julie Bowen) is killed, thirty five years or so after her friends were killed by the "Sweet Sixteen Killer." Why the name? Because of the killer stabs their victims, you guessed it, sixteen times. Also like your average teenager, her best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) has invented a time machine for the school's science fair, as one does.

Jamie's blasted back in time, to the night of the first of her mother's friends' murders, and that's about all you need to know. There's plenty of the obligatory scenes where Jamie comments on how insensitive and irrational the 80's were, yet she and everyone else keeps calling the killer "he" without knowing for sure. I'm not suggesting the killer's gender, nor will I get into gender politics, but it seems like a needless assumption that stands out for a film as self-righteous as this.

Because at the end of the day, this "is" a slasher, so there's plenty of horny teenage sex, or at least insinuation of handy-panky. I imagine it's to titillate actual teenage viewers, but is a non-teenager adult supposed to be aroused? Isn't that, gross? And since this takes place decades past, doesn't that mean those actual teenage viewers are watching people their parent's age "doing it?"

It probably doesn't matter, but hey, I thought it was a good question.

I won't go into much of the actual plot, since the murderer's, or murderers', is unknown, but you can expect all the same stupid moments like when, in a particularly frustrating and frequently repeated moment, the heroes don't unmask the masked assailant, but it's fine. At least "Totally Killer" doesn't masquerade as intelligent filmmaking the way "Scream VI" did.

Though, the more I think about it, Jamie here should have decades of horror cliches to help her solve the case, but alas, just another example of the film critic being smarter than the filmmakers.