Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023)

Childhood Nostalgia (and Fear)

If you grew up in the U.S in the ’80s or ’90s, there’s a great chance that you spent at least a few of your childhood birthdays at Chuck E Cheese. I certainly did! Founded by entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, the guy who created Pong, Chuck E Cheese featured the bizarre but entertaining combination of singing animatronic robots, classic arcade games, and cheap cardboard-flavored pizza.

Chuck E Cheese still exists today, of course, but the animatronics have mostly been fazed out. Modern kids aren’t interested in watching a bunch of archaic robots move and sing. That’s too bad, because they will never understand how creepy these animatronics were to us older generations.

I can personally remember being terrified by Dolli Dimples, a grotesque hippo humanoid who played piano in the cabaret section in the ’80s. Chuck E Cheese’s designers probably didn’t mean for Dolli or their other characters to scare children. Regardless of their intentions, there was something unmistakably eerie about their creations.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, and the videogame franchise that it’s based on, is inspired by that childhood fear. It’s about an abandoned, decrepit Chuck E Cheese-style restaurant that is haunted by the ghosts of dead children. The ghostly kids have possessed the animatronic characters that are still inside, turning them into creepy monsters.

Too Bad It’s Not Scary

five nights at freddy's review — Universal Pictures

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a bumbling security guard, gets hired to protect the restaurant from overnight intruders. He brings along his much younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), who naively develops a friendship with the animatronics. Meanwhile restaurant co-founder Steve (Matthew Lillard) pursues a secret nefarious agenda. Mike encounters a local cop, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who knows the restaurant’s secret.

This is a promising concept for a horror movie. Unfortunately, Five Nights at Freddy’s plays things too safe. It’s not scary enough to work as a horror movie, and not funny enough to work as a spoof. This is a bland, half-hearted effort with a predictable plot and shallow characters. The film is competently made on a technical level, but it lacks any truly memorable content. It’s disposable filler that most people will have forgotten within five minutes after seeing it.

It’s too bad, because this could have been something special. I preferred Willy’s Wonderland, a similar movie starring Nicholas Cage as a mysterious drifter who battles a comparable set of villains. Willy’s Wonderland is hardly a perfect film, but at least it has personality. It embraces its quirkiness instead of being a bland mainstream sellout.

A truly great horror movie about a Chuck E Cheese-type restaurant is yet to be made. Hopefully it will come to fruition someday. An entire subgenre of movies could be made about evil singing animatronic robots!