[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Film Brain ain't scared of animatronics, in fact he could probably survive five nights easy, it looks like a nice peaceful place for a nap if this disappointing film adaptation is anything to go by...
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, Josh Hutcherson has to survive five nights at Freddy's in the long-awaited video game adaptation.
00:11 [MUSIC]
00:28 Security guard Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson, is struggling to hold down a job
00:32 and keep custody of his younger sister Abby, played by Piper Rubio, from their Aunt Jane, played by Mary Stewart Masterson.
00:38 After visiting his career counsellor Steve Raglin, played by Matthew Lurd,
00:42 Mike gets a job at the long-abandoned Family Entertainment Centre Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.
00:47 There, he discovers the restaurant harbours dark secrets related to the animatronics,
00:52 and may be connected to the disappearance of his brother many years ago.
00:56 The Five Nights at Freddy's game series has been hugely successful ever since it launched in 2014,
01:01 but it's been a very, very long road for it to cross over onto cinema screens,
01:06 having been stuck in development hell for many, many years.
01:09 At one point, Warner Brothers was working on it, then the rights crossed over to Blumhouse,
01:14 Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies, was attached to it.
01:18 Two years ago, he dropped out.
01:20 In his place, Emma Tammy stepped into the director's chair, previously known for horror indies like The Wind.
01:27 She co-wrote the screenplay, along with Scott Cawthon, the game's creator, who is heavily involved in this film version.
01:35 Now, I will fully admit that I have never played Five Nights at Freddy's, but I know it by cultural osmosis,
01:42 and also by the fact that not one, but two movies actually beat it to the screen.
01:48 Five Nights has spent so long in development that it's actually been ripped off twice before it appears on screen.
01:54 It's late to its own party.
01:57 There was the Banana Splits movie, which, rumor has it, alleges that that was the Five Nights script that Warner Brothers had,
02:04 and they just replaced the characters with the Hanna-Barbera ones.
02:07 But also, you've got Nicolas Cage in Willy's Wonderland, where he played a silent protagonist,
02:12 facing off against animatronics in an old abandoned restaurant.
02:16 Sounds very familiar.
02:17 I actually quite liked Willy's Wonderland.
02:20 I was much less enamoured with the Banana Splits movie, but certainly that shows just how much you can do with the concept.
02:28 And rather depressingly, Five Nights at Freddy's, the actual movie, is worse than both of them.
02:35 Yeah, imagine that.
02:37 Imagine that the actual movie is actually less than the two movies that ripped off the premise.
02:44 And yet, here we are.
02:46 Probably the biggest positive out of the entire movie is the production design, or at least in terms of replicating the IEP.
02:53 The movie clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the third game in particular,
02:57 especially in terms of certain details about its plotting,
03:01 but definitely you can tell that a lot of time has been spent on trying to replicate the exact look and feel of the games visually,
03:10 and that's especially true of the animatronics.
03:13 It is very abundantly clear when you're watching the movie that the majority of the film's $20 million budget,
03:18 to put that in perspective, that's four times the budget of Willy's Wonderland,
03:22 went primarily on all the animatronics which were provided by the Jim Henson Company.
03:28 Instead of using CGI, they decided to opt for actual puppetry,
03:32 and that is definitely the best decision that they made out of the entire movie,
03:37 because those animatronics look fantastic.
03:40 They look great. They look very accurate to their game counterparts.
03:44 I think in terms of that, game fans will be exceptionally satisfied with the movie.
03:50 It looks exactly how you would imagine a Five Nights at Freddy's movie would look.
03:55 However, using animatronics does have limitations,
03:58 and that's very abundantly clear when you're watching the movie.
04:02 The animatronics don't actually move a lot of the time.
04:06 In fact, when they do move, it's usually in jump cuts, or usually by cutting away,
04:12 and they're just popping up behind characters,
04:14 so they don't have to move them in the frame a lot of the time,
04:18 and when they do have to move, you'll notice that the editing has to work around the fact
04:24 that they can't do continuous actions.
04:26 They can't do two actions in the same shot, for example.
04:29 It has to be action one, cut away, action two, cut away, and so on and so forth,
04:36 and so that does limit what the animatronics can actually do in the movie.
04:41 That's the trade-off you have for having big physical props on set,
04:46 but it means that there is actually something for the actors to react to,
04:50 rather than just having big CGI creations played by men in green suits.
04:55 Unfortunately, that's where most of the positives stop for me.
04:59 I was frankly astonished at just how much of a nothing movie this is.
05:03 It feels like the project has spent so long in development that the filmmakers gave up on
05:08 any ambitions other than just getting it across the finish line.
05:11 Well, congratulations, Five Nights at Freddy's does exist as a movie that runs
05:16 just under an hour and 50 minutes, but that's about it.
05:20 It just exists, and it has a whole load of completely baffling decisions,
05:26 especially when it comes to the screenplay.
05:29 I know it isn't a first draft because they've been working on it for eight years,
05:35 but it feels like something that they wrote in a weekend.
05:38 It just doesn't make any sense on any level whatsoever,
05:41 and I'm not talking about the game lore and things like that,
05:44 and I'm sure that loads of fans of the game will go,
05:47 "Well, that thing's related to that thing, and that thing's related to that thing."
05:50 Don't care.
05:51 It should work on its own as a movie, and as a movie onto itself.
05:55 You just find yourself going, "Why exactly did they do it this way?
05:59 Why did they pad this whole film out with a whole bunch of convoluted subplots
06:05 that actually have very little to do with the animatronics
06:09 that are meant to be the main focus of the movie?"
06:11 It's clear that, obviously, they wanted to take the heat off those animatronics
06:15 that can barely move because they need to pad out the rest of the story.
06:20 Yes, they need to flesh out the protagonist character because it's a movie,
06:24 not a video game where you're actually playing as the protagonist,
06:27 but I just found myself going,
06:28 "Why exactly did they give this backstory to Josh Hutchison's character
06:34 where he's a security guard,
06:36 but he also has a brother that was kidnapped many years ago,
06:40 and he's devoted to trying to find his brother,
06:43 and to do this, he essentially lucid dreams."
06:47 Yeah, I'm not kidding here.
06:49 Every night, he attempts to have the same dream,
06:52 to essentially flashback to when his brother was abducted
06:56 because he wants to try and find clues to who abducted him in his dreams,
07:01 which, when you say it out loud, sounds kind of stupid, and it is.
07:06 He goes around every night looking at a poster of Nebraska
07:10 and listening to nature sounds to try and bring him back into this moment.
07:15 I don't know what this actually accomplishes
07:17 because, I hate to tell them this,
07:19 but dreams are not really reliable in terms of investigation.
07:23 It could put any old thing in your head,
07:25 and it turns out that's exactly what happens
07:28 because the animatronics start invading his dreams somehow.
07:33 Yes, the animatronics start invading his dreams like they're Freddy Krueger.
07:37 The movie just keeps playing out the same dream sequence over and over again
07:41 with very slight permutations
07:43 and then passing very little new info to the audience.
07:47 Much of it is just him chasing around the spirits of these kids
07:50 trying to get them to tell him something about his brother's disappearance,
07:53 which they do.
07:54 Eventually, after an awfully long time waiting,
07:58 you do actually start to see the subplot connect with the main plot of the movie
08:02 through sheer absolute contrivance,
08:05 but these dream sequences are completely inert.
08:08 There's no tension or atmosphere or suspense built up in them.
08:12 They're not scary in the slightest.
08:14 They should be strange and surreal in some way,
08:18 and they aren't.
08:19 And clearly, the filmmakers are aware of just how completely unscary these scenes are
08:25 because they end several of them with the animatronics just slashing him in his dreams,
08:31 which makes no sense in the slightest,
08:33 aside from providing a jump scare,
08:35 because in reality, the animatronics seemingly have no interest in him
08:39 for the majority of the movie,
08:41 and also, it doesn't make sense for their plans to start attacking him,
08:45 especially because, for some weird reason,
08:48 the wounds start appearing in real life.
08:51 I guess they are Freddy Krueger.
08:52 But there isn't just one nonsensical subplot in the movie.
08:55 There's two, because we also have the one with the aunt,
08:58 played by Mary Stuart Masterson,
08:59 who is clearly meant to be a leopard print Karen.
09:03 Okay, her character's name is actually Jane,
09:05 but clearly that was where the thinking lay.
09:08 Jane wants custody of Mike's little sister that he's been the guardian of
09:12 ever since their mother died.
09:13 Apparently, the filmmakers understood that much of the older audience
09:17 remembers that Hutchinson was a child star about 15 years ago.
09:21 We're not ready to accept him as a daddy just yet.
09:24 But also, the aunt is trying to scheme around him.
09:28 His babysitter is actually working for the aunt,
09:31 trying to dig up anything to work for her in the custody battle,
09:37 but she's kind of struggling.
09:39 So she hires a bunch of goons to attack Freddy's to try and get him fired.
09:44 And this whole subplot is just ridiculous.
09:48 It has no business being in the movie,
09:51 and the only reason it's there is to have a bunch of extra characters
09:56 that can be killed off in the middle of the movie.
09:59 It has so little with what's actually going on
10:02 that Mike never finds out about the fact
10:05 that his babysitter was actually spying on him the whole time.
10:09 That never comes up.
10:10 It's all completely forgotten.
10:12 And that's the hilarious thing about this subplot.
10:15 Virtually everything about it is almost immediately discarded
10:19 the moment it's off screen.
10:21 A bunch of characters die.
10:22 They all completely disappear for the majority of the movie.
10:25 Hardly anyone mentions them.
10:27 When they disappear at Freddy's,
10:29 the aunt doesn't have a scene where she's wondering
10:31 where the hell they've got to
10:33 or why they haven't messed up the place properly
10:35 like they were supposed to.
10:37 No, she just disappears from the movie for an extended period of time.
10:41 Random, unnecessary plot holes just inserted into the narrative.
10:45 And Mary Stuart Marston is way too good for this kind of role.
10:49 It feels like she probably spent much of her time between takes going,
10:52 "I was in Benny and June.
10:54 "Do you remember fried green tomatoes?
10:57 "How did I end up playing the secondary human antagonist
11:00 "in a Five Nights at Freddy's movie?"
11:03 No one in the audience cares about this character.
11:05 And the only reason it's in the screenplay
11:08 is because for the first two thirds of the running time,
11:10 there is no conflict in the story aside from this character.
11:14 And even the filmmakers can't even be bothered to pretend
11:17 that they care about this subplot
11:19 because the only reason they would write a wicked aunt character
11:22 into a horror movie
11:23 is so they can get their richly deserved comeuppance
11:26 and the audience cheers at it.
11:28 And then the movie doesn't even deliver on that.
11:31 It happens off screen.
11:33 And then the moment it cuts away,
11:35 the movie just completely forgets about it,
11:39 even though it's a glaring plot hole in the ending.
11:41 Bravo! Fantastic writing. Great job, team.
11:46 And all this unnecessary junk is in the movie
11:48 because otherwise, without it,
11:50 it'd be even more frighteningly barren than it already is.
11:54 I don't think that Five Nights is a particularly hard game to bring to film.
11:57 In that you just pull from the game's narrative
12:00 and incorporate some of its gameplay mechanics
12:02 in some of the tension sequences.
12:04 That's all you have to do.
12:05 It's a survival game, after all.
12:07 You've got to go around fulfilling certain tasks
12:10 and try not to get attacked and jump scared.
12:12 I think that pretty much writes itself as a horror film,
12:15 but this screenplay makes it difficult on itself
12:18 because it incorporates virtually none of it.
12:21 Willy's Wonderland does a better job
12:24 of replicating the Five Nights gameplay mechanic in its movie
12:28 than the mainline Five Nights film does in its own adaptation.
12:33 And instead, in its place, it replaces it with nothing.
12:37 Absolutely nothing.
12:39 The first act of the movie is laboriously stretched out
12:42 as we're introduced to Mike,
12:43 and then he gets hired for the job,
12:45 and then he goes to the restaurant,
12:47 and he wanders around for a bit,
12:48 and then he finds the animatronics,
12:50 and he gets introduced to the whole deal.
12:52 "This is the lever you have to pull every so often."
12:55 Yada, yada, yada.
12:56 It's all these bricks of exposition.
12:59 Almost an hour passes in the movie
13:01 before anything actually scary happens in it
13:04 past the pre-title sequence.
13:07 Aside from that, almost nothing happens
13:10 for a very long period of time.
13:12 There's no attempt to build mood or atmosphere in these scenes.
13:17 It's just characters just reciting the game's backstory
13:21 to crushingly boring degrees.
13:25 It's not even held that Hutcheson is one of the least compelling main characters
13:28 in a horror movie I've seen in quite some time.
13:31 He spends the entire movie looking like he's on the verge of a nap.
13:34 And I know the character is meant to be sleep-deprived,
13:37 but even so, there's meant to be some level of charisma or personality
13:42 about the character,
13:42 aside from "My brother was kidnapped 20 years ago."
13:46 At least have a little bit of fright
13:49 when the animatronics are trying to attack you at points.
13:53 And then you contrast that with Elizabeth Lale's performance
13:55 as the cop Vanessa, who is giving him all these helpful hints,
13:59 which is overplayed by comparison
14:02 because she spends a lot of her early scenes going,
14:05 "I'm going to say a creepy thing just offhandedly."
14:07 "What was that?"
14:08 "Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing."
14:10 Just signaling the fact this character has some kind of twist about it,
14:14 almost like she's got a big neon sign over the top of her head.
14:18 It's such an unsubtle performance
14:21 that even people who haven't played the games
14:23 know that there's something up with this character
14:26 way in advance of when it's actually revealed.
14:29 It's ridiculous how badly the film fumbles that.
14:34 And I know that a lot of the core audience will already know it,
14:37 but the movie has to work for people who haven't played the games as well,
14:41 and it's not shocking for them.
14:43 But the movie's biggest cardinal sin is that it's just so boring to watch.
14:48 It does nothing with the games at all.
14:52 It does nothing interesting with it, and it builds no suspense.
14:57 It's just Hutchison wandering around dark corridors
15:00 for extended periods of time.
15:03 The animatronics aren't really hunting him for most of the movie.
15:06 They don't care about him a lot of the time.
15:09 In fact, they care so little about him
15:12 that he spends several nights of this movie lying at his desk asleep,
15:16 having those extended dream sequences.
15:19 Those are your five nights at Freddy's.
15:21 A nice long nap.
15:23 There you go.
15:24 Survive that, why don't ya?
15:26 And yes, I'm aware it's a PG-13 movie, or at least I am now.
15:30 Going into it, I wasn't, because the movie has a 15 certificate in the UK,
15:34 which means that anyone under the age of 15 cannot attend,
15:38 which has locked out many of the younger Five Nights fans from seeing it in the UK.
15:43 But I was thinking, because it shares the rating with Willy's Wonderland,
15:47 it's more on that kind of level.
15:49 Maybe not on the 18-rated Banana Splits movie, which was very heavy on the gore.
15:54 And as I understand it, Five Nights has never been really about all the grode.
15:58 But it is very obvious that the movie is cutting away very quickly
16:03 to avoid anything really bloody happening on screen.
16:07 And so it feels very tame and anemic most of the time.
16:12 But you know the one thing that PG-13 horror movies can do really well?
16:16 Jump scares.
16:17 And that's the thing that everyone knows Five Nights at Freddy's for.
16:21 Jump scares.
16:22 Jump scares everywhere.
16:23 You would think they would be all over this movie.
16:26 Curiously, though, they aren't.
16:28 There is a notable lack of jump scares in a Five Nights at Freddy's movie,
16:33 which might be the only place where you'd accept a bajillion jump scares happening.
16:38 In fact, the most jump scares in the movie is a little tiny mascot toy
16:43 that keeps popping up in lockers accompanied with a loud stinger sound.
16:47 And most of the other jump scares come from the cupcake animatronic,
16:51 which is the only animatronic that seems to actually do anything over the course of the movie.
16:57 And I understand the movie has a difficult time balancing maybe those younger Five Nights fans
17:01 who have come into horror through those games and maybe aren't ready for a full-on experience,
17:07 but also the expectations of genre fans.
17:09 But it barely even tries.
17:12 You spend much of this movie, which is meant to be a haunted house ride,
17:17 going "where are the scares? Where are the bits I'm supposed to jump at?"
17:21 I saw this with a mostly teenage crowd and they were amped up, ready to be scared.
17:28 They were jumping at doors opening, for crying out loud.
17:32 They'd psyched themselves up that much.
17:35 And I think even they came away disappointed.
17:38 You would think it would try and jolt you as many times as it can,
17:43 because that was all the stuff the games did.
17:47 It was cheap jump scares, the video game series.
17:51 But for some reason, there's no gore, there's no scares.
17:56 All we have to really take our attention away from the absence of
18:00 virtually anything that makes a good horror movie is Matthew Lurz's fairly brief performance in the film,
18:07 who completely understands just how ridiculous the assignment is
18:11 and just attacks the scenery with gusto,
18:14 and occasionally the cameo from an odd YouTuber that I've never heard of.
18:18 Look, there's two kinds of people in this world.
18:21 There are people that know what a MatPat is,
18:23 and those that live their lives thankful and don't really care.
18:27 Oh, look, he said the catchphrase, "Who gives a rat's ass?"
18:32 And what would have made it horrible is at least embracing the camp of the premise,
18:37 but instead the movie is so serious about itself.
18:42 It seriously thinks it says something about the poisoning of childhood nostalgia
18:47 with this subplot about Mike's brother getting kidnapped.
18:51 No one cares about it. No one went into this movie wanting that kind of stuff.
18:56 They came for the animatronics, and they hardly do anything for the majority of the movie.
19:01 And the one scene I can remember them from is some bizarre fort building montage.
19:06 Again, that's how little threat they pose in the movie.
19:09 There's a fort building montage in it.
19:12 Let's be clear, I had no expectations of this movie.
19:15 It's a game series I've never played, after all.
19:17 So all I asked for going into it was to be fun.
19:21 That's all I wanted.
19:23 That and maybe a little bit better than Willy's Wonderland and the Banana Splits movie.
19:27 That's not too high of a bar to clear.
19:29 The fact it managed to limbo underneath that is an impressive feat.
19:34 Five Nights at Freddy's, the movie, is tedious, incoherent, it makes no sense whatsoever.
19:40 There's dangling plot threads in the script.
19:44 It's not scary. There's no mood. There's no tension. There's no atmosphere.
19:48 It's a McDonald's hamburger of a horror movie.
19:51 It is completely bland.
19:54 Yeah, if you're a 13-year-old and this is your first horror movie,
19:57 you might get a little bit jolted by it,
19:59 but anyone who has watched anything even slightly harder than this
20:04 won't feel anything at all other than just crushing boredom.
20:09 I don't understand how they've managed to muck this up so badly.
20:13 The fact this managed to be successful over the weekend
20:16 has nothing to do with the quality of the movie
20:19 and everything to do with the strength of the brand
20:22 and the fact that people love the brand so much,
20:24 especially young kids and teenagers.
20:28 That's where the success story is.
20:30 The film, however, is easily one of my contenders for one of the worst movies of the year.
20:36 It is embarrassingly bad and worse, it's lazy
20:41 because all it does is just get the IP on screen.
20:44 They just did that and got the production design correct
20:47 and went, "That's our work done, pretty much.
20:49 Get it on there for about two hours and release it in cinemas."
20:53 Survive Five Nights at Freddy's?
20:55 I thought I was going to fall asleep.
20:57 Entertainment Earth is one of the world's largest sellers of memorabilia and collectibles,
21:01 including action figures, clothing, toys.
21:04 If you're a fan of something, they've probably got it.
21:07 And if you use my affiliate link, e.toys/filmbrain,
21:11 you'll get 10% off in-stock orders, as well as free domestic US shipping on all orders over $79.
21:17 If you like this review and you want to support my work,
21:20 you can give me a tip at my Ko-fi page
21:22 or my YouTube Super Thanks feature, which is right below the video.
21:26 You can find all the other places you can support me at my Linktree page,
21:30 or you can power my backup generator at my Patreon,
21:33 where you can see my videos early, among other perks,
21:35 including access to my Discord server,
21:37 or you can simply just like, share and subscribe, it all helps.
21:41 Until next time, I'm Matthew Burke, fading out.