Photo: Ryan Green/Universal Pictures
Injury. They did everything because of the injury. Even more than last time. If first Five Nights at Freddy's played as a clumsy attempt to introduce young children to horror pacing, and then continued the game feels like a clumsy attempt to introduce horror clichés to slightly older kids. And so, to the endless list of modern genre films about injurynow we have to add Five nights with Freddy 2. This makes some crazy sense: isn't the point of these movies to imitate all the other scary movies?
However, these Five Nights at Freddy's Movies based on the hugely popular video game series present a real audio challenge. You can't go through all the wild horror with them, but you can't become too carefree or stupid either; their stony seriousness is part of the coming-of-age ritual that defines these paintings. Yes, these are movies about giant animatronic animals in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese style pizzeria coming to life, but that dark, sandy movies coming to life with giant animatronic animals in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-style pizzeria.
It all begins with the gruesome 1982 stabbing of a young girl in the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza franchise, a different and far more extravagant establishment than the one the first film was about. The film then jumps forward 20 years to recall our heroes from the previous installment: young Abby Schmidt (Piper Rubio) and her grown older brother Mike (Josh Hutcherson), who, along with Vanessa Shelley (Elizabeth Lail), are still trying to cope with the horrific events of the last film. Vanessa has visions of being haunted by her dead serial killer father William Afton (Matthew Lillard), while Abby still wishes she could go back and interact with her animatronic friends who were possessed by the souls of the children Afton killed.
Abandoned pizzerias, lonely houses full of sinister ghosts, perpetual darkness and a stripped-down cast of characters make for a bleak, lonely world in which these films take place that is initially promising. Director Emma Tammy, returning from filming the first film, keeps the atmosphere fairly dark, but there's not much atmosphere here. Haunted pizzerias are not spaces for exploration or visual invention. These are just convenient, dimly lit settings for bloodless grotesquerie and a couple of harmless jump scares. (This new film features the Marionette, a tall, reedy, creepy, evil puppet with a big round crying face that is just scary to look at.) But the theme of trauma, much discussed by the characters, doesn't really get any aesthetic treatment. Even the film's central idea of a child interacting with giant surreal automata is such an eerily resonant image, reminiscent of James Whale's original. Frankenstein – ultimately, this is a bad option. It's just what happens.
'Cause it's darker and a little more intense Five Nights at Freddy's 2 It's a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake familial reserve for abject lifelessness. (Someone please re-release Poltergeist.) But this film is also more convoluted than the previous entry, introducing us to new rules of how this universe works without even attempting to disguise its clunky plot devices. Even some of the more intriguing plot points fall flat. Robotics-obsessed Abby is supposed to be participating in the school science fair, and we could briefly envision the idea of a children's science fair being chaotically overrun by giant, bloodthirsty animatronic animals a la Joe Dante. Don't worry too much – it's all done in the most boring way imaginable.
Still the first Five Nights at Freddy's was a huge success, and this new album may be too. Watching it at a local multiplex in a room full of young video game fans, I was moved—not by the film, but by the audience. These kids knew these characters and they applauded and laughed at all the things that flew over my head. They had a good time and it's hard not to be happy about it. But it's also hard not to feel like they deserve better.
