FREDDY MY LOVE
Main Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio
Director: Emma Tammi
We had the first table read for the workshop of my new show, Shuffle Along: The Walking Dead Musical yesterday. I was in general pleased with how things were beginning to shape up. I have a lovely chemistry with Tom Levitt who is playing Darryl opposite my Carol. I was not familiar with his work but he apparently had something to do with some failed musical about Marilyn Monroe a few years back. The biggest issue that will need to be fixed as soon as I can get a conference with the book writers is that altogether too much time is wasted on some trivial subplot involving some sort of policeman and a love triangle between him, his wife and his partner. It’s simply too maudlin for words. Perhaps if they were to write the wife out and have my character be the apex of the triangle instead we could have serious conflict ridden drama to melt the heart.
I brought up the idea of casting real zombies for the ensemble of shuffling ravenous zombie hordes that endanger us plucky survivors. I take it that the silence in the room following means that the creatives are giving the idea serious consideration. I think the dishwasher at my favorite Hatian-Creole restaurant in the Flatiron district would be more than happy to help locate the needed talent and I would be happy to have Lulu Pigg, my tap therapist, fly into town to teach them how to turn their shuffle shuffle shuffle into shuffle ball change. Not only would it add a real touch of authenticity to the production, but it would also provide all sorts of clever marketing and PR ploys in the lead up to what I am certain would be a glorious Broadway production, certain to sweep at the Tonys and run for a number of years.
I was feeling in a somewhat elated mood after the reading, likely helped by the large tray of Aperol spritzers on the sideboard of the studio reading room. I felt that the least I could do to celebrate would be to take in a film. I didn’t feel like fighting the crowds at the theater so I repaired back to my luxury suite at the Ritz Carlton and looked through the streaming possibilities. My eye fell upon a film previously unknown to me, Five Nights at Freddy’s, which apparently had some success last Halloween season. At first I was afraid it might be some sort of sequel to Freddy Got Fingered, but a quick check of the cast list showed that it was free of Tom Green so I figured it might be safe to watch and I do like a good horror thriller when I’m in an exuberant mood.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is apparently based on a series of video games written and designed by Scott Cawthon which gained popularity starting about a decade ago. In these games, the player is a night time employee working in a children’s pizzeria (think Chuck E. Cheese) where the animatronic animal mascots go berserk and try to kill you before your shift ends at dawn. I have not played these games (and there appear to be quite a lot in the series) but I have been told they have a cult following. I am always a bit suspicious of films based on video games as the storytelling needs of film and the storytelling needs of a video game, which must almost always be immersive first person, are so very different from each other.
In the film, we meet Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a down on his luck type who is trying to raise his much younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio). Their aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) is trying to wrest custody away from Mike so he is desperate to show he is a fit parent. The trouble is he is emotionally disturbed due to an incident when he was a child when his younger brother Garrett was kidnapped by a stranger on a family outing and never seen again. (What happened to the parents in the meantime is only vaguely alluded to and is one of numerous plot holes). When Mike is fired from yet another job for over reacting to what he interprets as a child endangerment situation, his career counselor (Matthew Lillard) had only one thing left in his file for him. Night security at a decrepit and abandoned pizzeria, Freddy Fazbear’s. In its heyday it was a mecca for families with children drawn to cheap eats, video games, tacky animatronic stage shows and other things familiar to those who made it through the 80s and 90s in company with a certain cartoon rat. But, after a string of mysterious child disappearances, it was closed and fell into ruin.
An introductory sequence lets the audience know that there’s something evil and preternatural about Freddy Fazbear’s and its animatronic inhabitants so when Mike shows up for his first shift with his neurotic tics, obsessive dreams about his past, and other psychodramas, it doesn’t take long for us to join him at jumping when things go bump in the night. The beat cop who covers that area of town at night, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) shows up on his first night, befriends him, and seems to know a little too much about the goings on in the darker recesses of the ruins of Freddy’s. And so we go from night to night, each one getting a little darker as we uncover all of the secrets of the place and its living animatronic characters.
Never having played the games, I was confused by the plot more than once. Ideas are set up, and then go nowhere. The animatronics, designed to look sinister, especially in dim or flickering light, may or may not be evil. There are some dream ghost children that are eventually explained but who leave more questions than answers. Little Abby seems able to influence the supernatural through her crayon drawings or maybe it’s influencing her. I could never really tell. When we understand there’s a big bad behind most of the mayhem, we know who it has to be as there’s only one character left with an unexplained resolution robbing the denouement of any surprise. The ideas are good. The storytelling is completely muddled. I assume a lot of elements are easter eggs to fans of the original video games, but I could be wrong.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is competently made. It comes from Blumhouse pictures which has specialized in low budget but well made horror over the fifteen years or so, bringing us dreck but also such significant films as Get Out, The Purge, and M3GAN. It was directed by a woman named Emma Tammi of whom I had not heard and whose prior credits include nothing I’ve ever seen. She also wrote the script together with Scott Cawthon, the creator of the original games, and Seth Cuddeback who also has no distinguished credits. A better screenwriter in the mix might have helped out some with the storytelling and fleshing out the characters and their psychology. Mary Stuart Masterson, in particular, is wasted as she’s only allowed to play a screeching harridan rather than a woman actually motivated by an interest in her relatives. Josh Hutcherson, despite the contraindications in the screenplay, makes a serviceable hero. You at least care a little bit about what’s going to happen to him. Everyone else has about as much depth as your average video game character which is, after all, what they are playing.
Should you spend a couple of hours with Five Nights at Freddy’s? There are worse things I suppose, like a root canal or a clostridium difficile infection. But in general I would suggest a good book.
Plastic cupcake head. Nebraska poster. Gratuitous mall fountain fistfight. Flickering electrics. 80s power ballad. Giant yellow chicken. Gratuitous pirate animal thing. Scared taxi driver.
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
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