The Substance (2024)

Very few movies ever truly catch my eye during awards season. The overwhelming majority of what's nominated for the top categories at the Academy Awards or Golden Globes likely won't appeal to me if I've even heard of them at all. That's not to say they're bad, that's just me saying I'm uninterested. But there was one that stood out among all the rest last year: The Substance.

I first saw The Substance just after the announcement of the Golden Globe nominees last year, and I knew precious little about it going in. I'd seen the trailer, knew it was a "body horror" movie, and that was it. The fact that it's a body horror movie caught me off guard, because I've been a horror fan for much of my life and am in no way used to seeing horror movies receive the overwhelming amount of love and praise The Substance got coming out of the Cannes Film Festival. Not to disparage the efforts of Jordan Peele's cast and crew, but Get Out won and was nominated for tons of awards and I still don't remember it having nearly the same amount of praise heaped upon it in 2017 as The Substance did in 2024.

I was afraid to watch it, honestly. I was afraid it would be insanely overrated, more hype than anything else. But I worked up the courage and loved it, and a year later, I am still upset that it didn't run the table at the the Oscars. And now that I might be here a little bit more often, let's do what I should've done here a year ago and talk about how freaking great The Substance is.

The movie quickly introduces us to Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once-acclaimed actress whose career has hit the skids. She was an Oscar winner at her peak, but a lack of meaningful work has left her stuck hosting a cheesy aerobics TV show. Or to be more accurate, she was hosting an aerobics TV show. I say that because Elizabeth is fired by her sleazeball producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) on her fiftieth birthday because he wants the host to be someone younger and sexier. And just to make sure her birthday is even worse, a distraught Elizabeth finds herself in a nasty car wreck almost immediately after leaving the show's studio and ends up in the hospital.

It is at the hospital where Elizabeth's life will begin heading in a direction she couldn't have possibly foreseen. A young nurse slips her a thumb drive containing an advertisement for "The Substance," a black market drug promising to unlock a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of those who use it. Though initially hesitant, Elizabeth ultimately decides the Substance is for her.

The Substance does indeed awaken a idealized version of Elizabeth, a young woman who literally tears her way out of Elizabeth's spinal column while leaving the 50-year-old woman we knew comatose on her bathroom floor. Adopting the name "Sue" (Margaret Qualley), this new self immediately charms Harvey and is hired to be the aerobics show's new host. Sue becomes an overnight sensation and begins living the life Elizabeth had wished for.

But use of the Substance comes with very strict instructions. Elizabeth and Sue are still technically the same person, and they must transfer their consciousness back and forth every seven days. Doses of the Substance must be closely regulated, and even the slightest abuse of or deviation from these rules can have disastrous consequences. And it wouldn't be a proper horror movie if those rules went unbroken.

Sue enjoys the limelight and her hedonistic lifestyle a bit too much, staying active longer than recommended. It starts as just a few short hours past the time limit. Hours become days, days become weeks, with Sue's excesses doing increasingly terrible damage to Elizabeth's body. This is exacerbated by their opposing views on how the Substance should be used and their increasingly different personalities, the whole thing ultimately leading Elizabeth and Sue to a war over what's supposed to be their shared consciousness.

When one sees the "body horror" label, one might think of John Carpenter's The Thing or most of David Cronenberg's movies. The Substance goes in its own direction. It is a gore-soaked indictment of this mistreatment of women by Hollywood's producers and casting directors (for example, Dennis Quaid's character sharing a name with Harvey Weinstein can't possibly be a coincidence), and an utterly unsubtle tale about ageism and someone who wants to change the flaws they perceive they have. That makes The Substance not quite feel like a horror movie in a traditional sense. It's not a ghost story, a zombie movie, a home invasion thriller, or a slasher movie. Instead, it's a horror movie about someone who simply hates where their life has taken them.

At the helm is writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who had only made one other feature film before this, that being the 2017 thriller Revenge. I watched Revenge while I was going through the notes I took for this review, and I can confidently say that Fargeat is a filmmaker who knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants her films to say it for her. She has a bold voice and style, which she puts to fantastic use in The Substance.

Fargeat had some amazing tools at her disposal while making the movie too. There's the intense, thumping electronic score composed by Raffertie, great editing, and fantastic cinematography. There are lots of uncomfortable closeups (especially when it comes to men eating food, something I noticed Fargeat also did in Revenge), along with disorienting shots of long corridors and camera angles that make smaller rooms look cavernous. Fargeat does not want to give you a moment to rest or to feel at ease, she wants to make sure you are not comfortable at all while watching this movie.

Another thing Fargeat carried over from Revenge was her striking use of colors. Instead of the sandy browns and sky blues of Revenge, we get much more in The Substance. There's the stark white tiling of Elizabeth and Sue's bathroom, the yellow of Elizabeth's coat, the greys and navy blues of their apartment's living room, the fluorescent green of the Substance itself. Fargeat's use of colors is almost more and more unsettling as the movie goes on, because you don't expect a movie like this to be this colorful. It's like Dorothy landed in the messed up part of Oz.

I also liked Fargeat approached the way the story was told. For example, the movie begins with a a two-minute montage at the beginning of the movie that centers solely around Elizabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We see the creation of her star, we see the fanfare she enjoyed so much at the peak of her career. But the passage of time and exposure to the elements create cracks in the star, tourists notice it and can't remember where they know Elizabeth from, people drop garbage on it. The transition from that montage to the taping of her aerobics show is all the backstory we need. We're told everything need to know in a way that I thought made for a creative way to begin the movie.

Even the set designers contributed to telling the story, with an oversized picture of Elizabeth that faces the windows in her apartment's living room, perpetually staring out at a billboard with Sue's face on it. It works as a very unique to approach Elizabeth and Sue's war. They're constantly face to face, staring at one another even while one is unconscious and the other is active.

But now that I think about it, it may not be as much a war between an aging woman and her younger doppelganger as it is one between an aging woman and her own fears and insecurities. Trying to hold herself to the standards of others has made Elizabeth her own worst enemy. As the Substance's advertisement itself says, "You can't escape from yourself."

I say this because by using Elizabeth and Sue are two sides of the same coin. It's who Elizabeth is versus who she wishes she could be. Sue abuses her time being active, while Elizabeth abuses herself by binging on every edible thing she can find in her kitchen while hiding from the outside world. Sue is young, gorgeous, and popular. She relishes all the attention she gets and has absolutely no problem with using her sex appeal to her advantage. She's also impulsive and prone to making rash decisions that will hurt her in the long run. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is very self-conscious about her age and brought down by men that view her as past her prime and treat her like a commodity that has lost its value. Elizabeth is also very jealous of Sue's fame and resents her for having what she desperately wanted to regain, while Sue intentionally ignores the rule about switching places because dealing with Elizabeth is getting in her way.

I mentioned earlier that Fargeat had some great tools at her disposal, and I would be foolish if I did not mention that one of them is the cast. There's not a lot of actors in the main cast, but it's not meant to be a huge ensemble anyway. Let's start with Dennis Quaid, whose character is the slimiest asshole you'll ever see. Quaid's performance is completely over the top, which is perfect for the character and the movie as a whole. Margaret Qualley is also great as Sue. Sue is a vain, self-centered bitch, and Qualley does a great job putting that forward.

The movie, however, is completely owned by Demi Moore. There were so many award ceremonies that saw Moore nominated in the Best Actress category, and for good reason. It had been said by pretty much everyone that about The Substance immediately after its release that she hasn't had any really notable roles in the last twenty-five years, spending being more known as tabloid fodder since the turn of the millennium. I think I know more about her marriage to and divorce from Ashton Kutcher than I do any movies she's been in since the year 2000. But The Substance, however, shows just how good an actress Moore is.

It's a brave turn for her, as the concept requires not only for her character to start vulnerable and become more and more bitter and angry as we build towards the movie's utterly unhinged final twenty minutes, but also requires Moore (who was 61 when the movie was released, a full decade older than her character) to wear an increasing amount of hideous monster makeup as the movie progresses. If the people that thought her shaving her head for G.I. Jane was a big deal back in 1997 knew this would be in her future, they'd have lost their minds.

But her performance is more than just wearing heavy prosthetic effects and being upset with men treating her like she's unattractive because she's middle-aged. There is a scene roughly halfway through the movie where Elizabeth is preparing to go out on a date with a high school classmate who believes she's still as beautiful as she were when they were teenagers. But one look at Sue's unconscious body and the billboard I mentioned earlier makes her hate her own reflection in the mirror. She can't possibly see herself as being as beautiful as Sue, even after spending another ten minutes trying to doll herself up, so she just angrily wipes her makeup off before ghosting her date. It's a powerful scene, one of the best in the whole movie. It goes a long way in showing just how low Elizabeth's view of herself is, and how strong Moore's performance is. Moore will absolutely convince you of Elizabeth's refusal to believe in herself and that she's been led astray by the superficiality of Hollywood.

If you haven't seen The Substance, you are missing out on what I would call one of the best movies of this decade. I do not believe this to be hyperbole. It's an utterly fantastic movie that is absolutely worth seeing. Will it appeal to everyone? Absolutely not, and I would be foolish to believe that it would. But The Substance is a movie that will stay with you. It's driven heavily by its visuals and Demi Moore's performance, but there's so much more going for it than that. All the gore and shocking body horror might be gross on the surface, but it's also a surprisingly deep story about how gross the treatment of women in Hollywood (and really, the entertainment industry as a whole) can be. If there's one thing for absolutely certain, The Substance is more than just a movie. It is an experience.

Final Rating: *****

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025)

Just in case you missed my review of it earlier this month, I did not like the first Five Nights at Freddy's movie. It was a dishearteningly dull movie, never using its setting or concept for anything beyond inviting the franchise's diehard fans to join a 109-minute Easter egg hunt. It wasn't scary or really worth watching a second time, and the only parts of it I actually liked were barely in the movie at all. But what do I know? The movie made 297 million dollars at the box office, just a fraction short of fifteen times its production budget, when it was released two years ago. Maybe people saw something I didn't.

I also said in my review that I'd likely give the sequel a shot when it hit streaming, and a little over three weeks later, here we are. Much like the last movie, the sequel is full of untapped potential. The potential for an amazing horror movie is painfully obvious as you watch it. But that potential goes utterly untapped. I desperately wanted to like this movie, for its makers to say, "If you didn't like the first movie, we're gonna use the sequel to change your mind." But no, they didn't do that. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is just more of the same old bullshit I saw last time.

Beyond a brief prologue, the movie takes place one year after we left Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to put the whole thing behind him, while Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is haunted by nightmares of the animatronics and her murderous father (Matthew Lillard). Young Abby (Piper Rubin), however, is still in mourning. The ghosts inside the animatronics were her friends, even if she knew them only briefly.

She sneaks out one night to see them, hoping that they're still some semblance of active, but is heartbroken when she discovers that they aren't. Abby does, however, find a "FazTalker" toy (imagine a Freddy Fazbear-branded version of a Speak & Spell) in the remains of the pizzeria's prize booth and takes it home to remember them by.

But there's some rough stuff up ahead. A group of ghost hunters visit the very first Freddy Fazbear's location, which was closed down shortly after a child was killed there in 1982. They end up accidentally awakening "the Marionette," a cruel animatronic powered by the unfettered rage of that murdered child's spirit. The Marionette contacts Abby through the FazTalker and pretends to be the friendly animatronics she knows, manipulating her into helping the original location's animatronics reach the outside world so that the spirit can finally have the revenge it has spent twenty years longing for.

This is not a good movie. It actually doubles down on what I didn't like about the first one, by having more stuff that could've made for an awesome movie front and center but never doing anything worth a damn with it. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has fantastic outfits for the animatronic performers to wear, bigger stakes, and an intriguing villain that could be a million times scarier than what we saw in the first movie if used right. But it's still lousy, and that somehow makes it worse. A movie that obviously has all the cards to be great but still turns out bad is somehow more disappointing than just a movie that's simply bad.

Director Emma Tammi returns to helm the movie, and she does a slightly better job behind the camera this time around, but that isn't saying much. The movie's pacing is horribly inconsistent, never really getting into any kind of groove as it stops and starts trying to balance its different subplots. And then there's the fact that absolutely nothing resembling suspense is on the menu at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. All you're getting are loud noises and shitty jump scares instead of things that are actually frightening. I know the game franchise relies a lot on that kind of thing and doing that makes it accurate to the games, but it gets very tiresome in movie form. It's the equivalent of someone jumping out of nowhere and blowing an air horn in your ears every few minutes. It's one of those cases where I'd actually be okay with an adaptation straying as far as possible from the source material.

I'm also astounded by how tame the movie is. I know aiming for a PG-13 was a necessity because the movie's target audience is so young. But what little violence is in the movie feels so dreadfully limp because of it. Some characters are attacked via jump scare and disappear from the movie. Another is torn to pieces and what we see looks like a production assistant hacked up a mannequin and threw the parts onto the set. Someone else gets his head crushed by "Toy Freddy" and it just looks like he's getting a scalp massage. I'd be foolish to expect a ton of gore, but give us something.

There is, however, one sequence roughly forty minutes into the movie that I really liked, where Vanessa tries confronting the spirit of her father in a dream. The scene is actually very well done, genuinely serving as the scariest part of the movie. The whole movie being more like this would've made for something I'd have enjoyed a lot more (or at least hated less).

Franchise creator Scott Cawthon, meanwhile, has sole writing credit for the sequel, and you can definitely tell he's a game developer and not a screenwriter. The story feels like a bunch of subplots that Cawthon came up with but never bothered developing. For example, Abby is ostracized at school because her classmates all think she's a weirdo, with only one little boy giving her the time of day. Cawthon could've spun that into Abby making a human friend and being at ease without her beloved animatronics, but the little boy only has two or three scenes tops. An epilogue where he invites Abby to hang out with him would've been welcomed, a cute moment to conclude the movie, but he's ultimately not important to anything going on.

And I absolutely cannot forget FazFest. It's established that Mike and Abby's aunt was committed to an asylum after encountering "Golden Freddy" in the first movie, her outrageous story about haunted mascots from the local pizza place sparking an urban legend that becomes the theme of the town festival seen in this movie. However, the festival idea accomplishes nothing outside of "Toy Chica" (who is inexplicably voiced by Megan Fox of Jennifer's Body and Transformers fame) defending an upset Abby from an excessively mean science teacher, as well as a fun moment where "Toy Freddy" is believed to be someone in a costume, but the festival idea doesn't accomplish anything.

The animatronics are out in public at a festival themed around them, why not have them run amuck at the festival itself? Make it like the cornfield rave scene from Freddy vs. Jason. Even if the PG-13 rating would keep it from being a bloodbath, the concept alone could've made for an awesome climax. With the exception of one scene where Vanessa stops "Toy Bonnie" from attacking a family in their house, the last half hour of the movie is at the original pizzeria and the Schmidt house. It leaves the festival as another interesting idea that served no true purpose.

And then there's the cast, who is once again dull as dishwater with the exception of Matthew Lillard. He's genuinely frightening in the one scene he's in. It's the scariest part of the entire movie, and it made me feel like he should be the primary monster instead of the Marionette or the Fazbear gang. But that's the sad part is, like I said, he's in one scene. If any Five Nights at Freddy's fans are reading this, please answer this: does his character get a bigger role in any of the games? I ask because I will absolutely watch as many sequels as it takes for him to be given more to do.

To be fair, I won't completely crap on all the actors in the movie though. Skeet Ulrich isn't bad in his cameo as the father of the spirit haunting the Marionette, and I'd have enjoyed seeing more of Mckenna Grace in her small role as the leader of the ghost hunters. But much like the first movie, Lillard absolutely steals the show here.

One of the ghost hunters asks early in the movie, "What the hell kind of kid would want to come here?" I'm asking myself the same question. It just blows my mind that the Five Nights at Freddy's super-fans would be okay with this. But I guess if they keep making money, why change what works? Five Nights at Freddy's 2 might not be good, but I can't say it wasn't a hit. It'd probably made even more money and waited another few weeks for its digital release if Avatar: Fire and Ash hadn't just come out looking to kill everything else at the December box office. There will surely be a third movie, if the post-credits scenes were any indication. All I can hope is that whenever it comes out, the third time will be the charm and I'll actually like it.

Final Rating: *½

Come True (2020)

The movie theater I usually go to is a small mom-and-pop theater at the end of a strip mall in a rural part of Kentucky. Due to its small size, being in the middle of nowhere, and not being part of a big chain like AMC, Regal, or Cinemark, they don't show a lot of foreign movies or movies from smaller distributors. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and what theaters remaining open struggled to keep their lights on, that small theater spent several months showing both older releases and low-budget indie movies alongside the handful of new movies the big studios were able to release and send them. I got to see Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead on the big screen, and it allowed me to see Jaws for the very first time.

Among the indie movies they showed was Come True, which ran at what film festivals it could during the second half of 2020 before playing in a mere 96 theaters in the United States in the spring of 2021. I saw it at that theater, probably the only person that saw it the whole time they had it, and thought it was absolutely fantastic. But I haven't seen it since then, so I decided to come back and check it out to see if what I thought now lines up with what I thought then. Almost five years after the fact, I feel confident saying that while Come True is not a perfect movie, it kept me glued to the screen wondering just where the story would take me.

Trying to avoid her mother has made eighteen-year-old Sarah Dunn (Julia Sarah Stone) essentially homeless. She spends her nights in the local park or on her best friend's couch, only returning to her mother's house when nobody else is home to change her clothes and steal food. This also has a negative effect on Sarah's sleep routine, struggling to stay awake during the day and plagued by horrible nightmares when she does sleep. Her nightmares are the same every night: she's stuck in an increasingly bizarre maze that leads to a shadowy figure with glowing eyes.

Needing money and becoming more unnerved by her nightmares, Sarah applies to be a test subject in a sleep study, the purpose of which is not revealed to her or any of the other applicants. Her nightmares eventually worsen after a few nights, and she panics when she's shown a picture the figure amongst the data the scientists running the study have compiled. One of these scientists, an odd one nicknamed Riff (Landon Liboiron), finally relents and tells her the truth: the clinic is testing new equipment that can map dreams and turn mental images into pictures.

Though she's angry about it, Sarah agrees to continue the study, but she doesn't stay for long. The next night sees everyone that's part of the study dream about that same figure, some having very much worse experiences than others. Sarah flees the clinic, unsure of where to go, what to do, or how much danger she may or may not be in.

Come True wasn't quite as good as I remembered it being in 2021. That said, I still liked it a lot. It's a captivating ride, and at the very least, it's an interesting entry into the world of low-budget indie horror and science fiction. It's got scares, but they're actually few and far between. Instead, the movie tries its best to make the viewer uncomfortable. It wants you to, much like its characters, feel like you just woke up from a bad dream. That's actually what I liked the most about it. That uneasy feeling made Come True stand out from a lot of the horror movies I've seen over the last few years.

Holding the movie's reigns is Anthony Scott Burns. He wore many hats during production, being credited as the director, writer, cinematographer, and editor, and under the "Pilotpriest" moniker he uses for his musical career, he composed the movie's score in tandem with the Canadian synthpop duo Electric Youth. With all these tools at his disposal, Burns crafts a movie that may be deeper than I can personally understand. I've been told that the writings of Carl Jung were an influence here, but I barely know who he is at all, so that's all way beyond my understanding. That said, Come True is beautifully made. Much of the movie is bathed in a pale turquoise with the occasional small splash of pale pink, making the contrast between it and Burns' heavy use of shadows and darkness feel haunting.

The cinematography is beautiful, and combined with a musical score reminiscent of work by John Carpenter, it makes what we see feel very ethereal and appropriately dreamlike in a way where it's simultaneously peaceful and not quite right. And that "not quite right" feeling becomes important as the movie progresses, because as it approaches the end, things feel more and more wrong. The lighting is darker, the atmosphere more uncomfortable in a way that works in the movie's favor.

The script also keeps much of what's happening a mystery. We're never really sure why anything is the way it is. Elements feel like they're dropped, new things are introduced out of seemingly nowhere, and the movie's bizarre twist ending doesn't help matters either. Like I alluded to earlier, I'd probably understand it more if I knew more (or honestly, literally anything) about Jungian theories. But even though I don't, it makes Come True more effective. It's like actually being in a dream, where nothing makes sense like it should, and sometimes you wake up unsatisfied or bothered by the story your brain was telling you. And sometimes you just plain can't make heads or tails of it.

The small cast also does a fine job contributing to the movie, but they're all carried by Julia Sarah Stone. You want to reach into the movie and give her character a hug and tell her that everything will be fine. Stone plays Sarah as someone whose whole life is an absolute wreck, one that worsens as the sleep study continues. The utter desperation and fear her character must be feeling is on full display every second she's on the screen.

All told, Come True isn't a movie for everyone. And while there are things I wish I'd seen from it and other things I was disappointed with, I also understand why they were done that way. It's still a good movie that is worth seeing, especially if you like your movies to be more on the unusual or disorienting side. Come True has a lot of ambition, and I imagine would be an exorcise in "lo-fi" genre filmmaking that intellectuals would eat up. Even a non-intellectual like me found a lot of positives in it. Give it a shot because you never know, Come True could be the movie of your dreams.

(No, I will not apologize for that bad joke.)

Final Rating: ***½

Willy's Wonderland (2021)

In my review of Five Nights at Freddy's, I mentioned that "mascot horror" almost always stays within the realm of independent video games. That's where the majority of its popularity stems from, after all. But it's occasionally branched out into movies too. For example, The Banana Splits Movie found a small fanbase thanks to the sheer absurdity of a Hanna-Barbara kids' show from the 1960s being adapted into a modern slasher movie, while also predating that recent and unfortunate trend of beloved children's characters from the past being reimagined as modern horror villains. There's also the movie I wanted to talk about right now, Willy's Wonderland.

Though the creative team behind it may or may not actually admit it, it's hard to deny that Willy's Wonderland began as an obvious ripoff of Five Nights at Freddy's. A cursory glance at their most basic concepts makes the similarities painfully obvious; Willy's Wonderland is roughly the same idea without a decade worth of lore. But unlike the the poorly made, microbudget ripoffs and cash-grabs that you expect when something that fits into the "mockbuster" label, Willy's Wonderland is one that is an absolute blast from beginning to end.

It does more than badly imitate a more well-known property's ideas, it does more than take the basic "someone is trapped in a haunted Chuck E. Cheese knockoff" idea and make something with no heart or soul. Willy's Wonderland completely embraces the inherent B-movie insanity of the whole thing to create something I found to be utterly captivating, and I cannot say enough good things about it.

The movie focuses on a silent, anonymous drifter (Nicolas Cage) who finds himself stranded on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere after a spike strip left in the road takes out all four of his car's tires. The super-sketchy local mechanic only takes cash and there are no working ATMs for miles, so a deal is struck: a sleazy local businessman will cover the repair bills if the drifter spends the night doing janitorial duty at an abandoned children's entertainment center called "Willy's Wonderland."

Sounds simple enough, right? That's where you're wrong. Just when Willy's Wonderland's new janitor begins what sounds like a mundane new job for just a night, he discovers the restaurant's eight withered animatronic mascots are alive, possessed by the spirits of a satanic cult and determined to kill anyone who walks inside. But the janitor won't let that, nor the dispensable group of teenagers that break in at some point during the movie, stand in his way as he cleans up the place as he'd been hired to do.

I first saw Willy's Wonderland not long after it was released back in 2021 and immediately fell in love. Not one single frame of the movie's entire 89-minute runtime is meant to be taken seriously. It is a batshit insane combination of every silly cheap slasher movie trope and cliché played fast and loose. I honestly don't know if I can convey just how utterly bonkers Willy's Wonderland is.

Director Kevin Lewis and writer G.O. Parsons treat the movie as if it were something made by Sam Raimi if he got his start now instead of 1981. There's a paltry budget and a cast and script that might not be all that great, but there's also an energy there that can and will keep people engaged with what's on the screen. There are parts that are sluggish, but I found myself willing to overlook those moments because the rest of the movie made up for it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of this review gushing about Nicolas Cage and his performance as the silent badass credited solely as "the janitor." He is the biggest reason why this movie is so much fun. You absolutely will not give a shit about any other actor or character in this movie. I said before that the characters are disposable, and that is 100% true. They're solely there to be numbers for an episode of Dead Meat's Kill Count videos on YouTube, they're caricatures of characters you'd see in some cheap slasher movie with the actors giving performances that match. All that's asked of them is to deliver stilted dialogue and do stupid things that you've seen in a hundred other horror movies. And let's face it, you're not gonna remember or even care about the obviously evil locals that are in on the whole thing or the idiot teenagers that have shown up to burn the place down, but split up to have sex and smoke weed despite knowing the place is a death trap. You're here for Nicolas Cage.

The janitor almost doesn't belong here, with Cage himself saying in an interview on the Blu-ray's special features that it was a "Pale Rider meets Killer Klowns from Outer Space" situation. That's a fun way to describe it, because it feels like the janitor escaped from an action movie or a Western and somehow ended up in a cheesy slasher movie. It's like if someone dropped the Doom Slayer into one of those post-Scream horror flicks from around the turn of the millennium, only if the Doom Slayer were a little bit more kooky.

Much like the Doom Slayer (and "Doomguy" before him), the janitor doesn't speak one word of dialogue throughout the entirety of the movie. We only ever hear Cage's voice through the occasional grunt while he fights the merry band of monsters. A quiet hero is nothing new, his silence would make him just as menacing as the villains if this were any other movie. But this isn't any other movie. It loops around and becomes hilarious because he never responds to any character beyond a simple nod, if he even gives them that.

Dialogue, much like a backstory or even a name, would just get in his way. His sole focus is doing his job as a janitor. When one of the teenagers tries talking him into leaving, giving the janitor (and the audience) the backstory of the place, he seems like he's outright ignoring her. He doesn't respond, he doesn't look at her, he doesn't even acknowledge that she's speaking. The janitor just goes on about his business.

It's as if he's taking the janitor job so seriously that even fighting the monsters is as much a part of his duties as mopping the floors and washing the windows, and everyone else there is slowing him down. He cleans up the messes left by every fight and throws what's left of the animatronics out with the trash, makes sure his uniform is tidy, and occasionally stops by the break room to have a drink of soda and play a round of pinball. And he takes his regularly scheduled breaks seriously, going as far as to drop what he's doing and take them as a fight is about to begin, returning once his time is up so the fight can commence.

In the that interview on the Blu-ray I mentioned earlier, Cage said that he drew inspiration from Harpo Marx and Buster Keaton, along with Charles Bronson's performance in Once Upon a Time in the West, to prepare for Willy's Wonderland, and I absolutely believe him. He plays it as both a comedic and a serious role at the exact same time. Cage cleaning an abandoned building and beating monsters to death while intermittently playing pinball and chugging soda just feels right. You're probably not gonna find any memes here like you would with Vampire's Kiss or the remake of The Wicker Man, but this fits in perfectly with his more recent roles in movies like Mandy and Color Out of Space.

I've long forgotten specifically who I heard it from, but I once heard an online film critic say, "A movie doesn't have to be good to be awesome." And that's a perfect way to sum up Willy's Wonderland. It is not a perfect movie by any means, but it damn sure is a fun one. I've watched it more than once and it's still one of the most entertaining B-movies I've seen in a very long time. This movie goes all in in the silliness, which is one of the big reasons I prefer it over the Five Nights at Freddy's movie. I don't need Blumhouse playing this concept seriously while trying to shoehorn in a bunch of fanservice from video games I'll never play, I just need Nicolas Cage fighting monsters. That suits me just fine.

Final Rating: ****

Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)

A new subgenre of horror began to carve out a niche for itself during the second half of the 2010s. It came to be called "mascot horror," due to the villains usually being colorful characters that could easily be mistaken for (or sometimes actually are) the mascots of a beloved children's franchise.

If you're not familiar with it, mascot horror has made its home in the world of independent video games. An absolute ton of them have been released on Steam over the last decade, with notable examples including Poppy Playtime and Bendy and the Ink Machine. But much like how Godzilla is the king of all monster movies, at the top of the entire "mascot horror" subgenre sits Five Nights at Freddy's.

Developed by Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy's began as a single game published on Steam in the summer of 2014. Indie games arrive and disappear all the time, so despite the good reviews it got, it likely would've just flown under everyone's radars had it not been for YouTube. Videos about the game by a number of super-popular YouTubers got millions of views, shining a spotlight on the game and helping make it a surprise success.

It was so successful, in fact, that Cawthorn created a sequel just three months after the first game's release, and it's snowballed from there. Five Nights at Freddy's has since blossomed into a franchise that's produced twenty official games by my count, as well as novels, tabletop games, Halloween costumes, coloring books, toys, an insane amount of fanmade projects, and an attraction as part of the 2025 edition of "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Studios Hollywood. One of its villains even appears alongside a cornucopia of iconic horror characters as downloadable content for Dead by Daylight.

So of course, Hollywood came calling to make a movie too.

After years of production delays and behind-the-scenes shake-ups during its development, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Studios released a Five Nights at Freddy's film adaptation simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock a few days before Halloween in 2023. And while it was largely panned by critics, it was a box office success and became one of Blumhouse's biggest hits.

Having never played any of the games (and never having had any interest whatsoever in them, if I may be honest), I didn't have a lot of interest in the movie. But the sequel comes out today and I could use some content for this blog, so what the heck, I might as well watch it. And truth be told, it's just okay at best. It's a passable movie that could've been worse, but it could have been much better too.

Meet Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man with low prospects and an unfortunate inability to stay employed. It leaves him unable to pay his bills, and at risk of being both evicted from his home and losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But an odd opportunity soon presents itself when Mike is offered a job working as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. A combination of pizzeria and playground, it was immensely popular back in the '80s, but was shut down at its peak after five children went missing. Now it merely stands as an abandoned, dilapidated shell of its former self.

Mike's first few nights seem relatively unremarkable, mostly just dozing off on the job and dealing with the mess a group of vandals left behind. But when he has to start bringing Abby to work with him following the disappearance of her babysitter, shit really starts to hit the fan. It turns out the pizzeria's four animatronic mascots ― Bonnie, Foxy, Chica, and Freddy Fazbear himself ― can come to life. While Abby believes them to be her friends, Mike discovers that they have more malevolent intentions that put both he and his sister in grave danger.

I will be upfront and say that I am not the target audience for Five Nights at Freddy's. That's why it took me two whole years to bother watching the movie, because I had a feeling that much like the games, the movie just wouldn't be for me. And having actually watched it now, I can say that my suspicions were correct. But that's not to say I hated it either. There's a lot of stuff here that I wanted to like, a lot of elements that would've made for something fantastic had the movie itself just been stronger as a whole. Five Nights at Freddy's is one of those times where I saw there was a chance it could be really good, but it stopped just a few yards short of the goal line.

The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it felt like Emma Tammi's direction and the script written by she, Seth Cuddleback, and Cawthon didn't strike me as being very confident in knowing just what kind of movie was supposed to be made. The first half of the movie gives us a scene where Freddy and the other mascots separate and kill a group of vandals that have broken in, and you begin to think that's where the movie might go. There's lots of jump scares, and a sequence that's actually pretty tense by kid-friendly standards. But then the second half of the movie starts leaning more towards something that tries to be more psychologically thrilling when it really isn't.

The dueling plotlines of a custody battle between Mike and his aunt over Abby, and Mike's recurring and evolving nightmares about the abduction of he and Abby's brother many years earlier, feels like something I would expect from a horror movie that's a bit more mature. Maybe put a full-fledged cult in there, maybe put Ari Aster's name on there as a producer, and it'd be one of the "emotional trauma porn" horror movies that A24 and Neon have released over the last few years.

It doesn't really do the mature stuff well, nor the "killer Chuck E. Cheese animatronics" side either. Neither the director nor the script put the idea of being stuck inside an rundown arcade/pizzeria with a bunch of monsters to any good use. The set design is downright bland, and there's never any energy pulled from it. Outside of one scene near the end where Abby hides in an old ballpit, the setting itself is never really utilized at all. You're in an arcade and singing, dancing creatures that look like they escaped from a demented furry convention are trying to kill you, you can do something to play up the inherent silliness of it. The movie's concept and the outfits Freddy and his friends wear are too good to just half-ass it. I know the franchise's main demographic is kids, but this movie is begging for someone to use it as an excuse to completely rip off Chopping Mall.

And then there's a cast who I think weren't bad, but they deserved more than what they had to work with. Josh Hutcherson's performance feels like he was desperate for better material than what he was given, while I found Piper Rubio was adorable. I did like Elizabeth Lail as well, even though I thought her character (that of a local cop who slowly tells Mike about the pizzaria's dark history) was a little on the bland side.

The best parts of the whole movie, though, came from two people who are barely in the movie at all. One I wanted to highlight is Matthew Lillard. He's barely in the movie at all, showing up at just the beginning and again during the climax. But Lillard milks what time he has for everything it's worth, stealing what scenes he's in by overacting his ass off and being one of the most memorable elements of the movie because of it.

The other actor I wanted to highlight is Mary Stuart Masterson as Mike and Abby's aunt, who is trying to get guardianship of Abby solely so she can get financial assistance from the government. Much like Lillard, Masterson only appears in a few scenes and has roughly six or seven minutes of screen time in total. She makes it every second count, however, by being wonderfully bitchy and making you love to hate her character.

As I said before, Five Nights at Freddy's wasn't made for me. It was made for its fans. And that's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm on the outside looking in, watching a celebration of something that I know so precious little about. Speaking as an outsider, Five Nights at Freddy's is almost two hours of mediocrity. I don't want to say it was a victim of the old trope that movie adaptations of video games are bad, because it isn't. But it has so many half-baked ideas and so much unrealized potential that I'm more disappointed with the movie than anything else.

Today sees the theatrical release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, and I'll likely give it a shot when it eventually hits streaming. So here's hoping that the sequel will be more satisfying than the first one.

Final Rating: **