by | Bella Herrera
Staff Reporter
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was terrible. Released to theaters Oct. 27 the Five Nights of Freddy’s movie is the newest addition to the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise. The Five Nights at Freddy’s fandom has been anticipating this movie since February, but now that it’s out there’s nothing to be excited about.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game series created by Scott Cawthon. You play as a newly hired security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza; a shut-down children’s entertainment pizzeria with haunted animatronics that try to turn you into one of them every night. The goal of the game is to survive for five nights.
It was hard to even watch the movie because the camera work was so bad. The backgrounds were over blurred to the point that the background would end up becoming the only thing you could pay attention to because it was just such a strange decision. The camera also just wouldn’t stay still, in almost every scene it was moving slightly to the right or left and it was disorienting. An unsteady camera can sometimes be a great way to strike an uneasy feeling in your audience if you’re filming a horror, but the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie didn’t seem to know what genre it even was.
The very beginning of the movie seems like a classic horror film, with the late security guard desperately trying to free himself from one of the animatronic’s death traps, but it doesn’t stick to that for long. There was this one scene that was trying to be funny with this lawyer with a weird face, then there was like a happy-go-lucky montage with the animatronics and Michael’s little sister Abby. Some movies can mix genres and still come out with a cohesive, good movie but the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie didn’t.
On top of the movie trying to take on too many genres, it also tried to fit in way too many plot lines. Micheal was in a custody battle with his aunt over Abby while at the same time trying to find his brother’s killer through this recurring dream, and then he starts working at the pizzeria and meets Vanessa which causes what seemed like a potential love subplot. It’s all just too much and the movie didn’t need to have so much going on. It could’ve just been the animatronics and nothing else and people would have been happy. The movie might have been ok if they just stuck more strictly to the plot.
One thing you could argue the Five Nights of Freddy’s movie did right was its choice of actors.
Everyone in the film seemed comfortable in their field and you could tell they were trying their best with the script they were given, but acting alone only goes so far. If your script is bad then it ruins everything, and the lines in this movie were so unbelievably silly which would be fine if they weren’t supposed to be serious. Vanessa threatening to shoot Michael and William announcing that he always comes back, was just too dramatic and it came off goofy.
Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was hard to watch both physically and mentally. It seemed like it was the camera person’s first time being behind a camera and the writer seemed just as clueless when writing the script. This movie was a trainwreck that no amount of celebrity guest appearances could ever save because the movie was ruined as soon as it was thought up and it should have never been made in the first place.
