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 was in no rush to see 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: **

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025)

Now I know what you're thinking, "Why dust off this old review blog after so long?" It's been three years since the last time I posted anything, and even then, I hadn't posted with any regularity since 2014.

But I do swing by here every so often to reminisce, and fix typos I hadn't noticed while I'm at it. After a while, I started thinking maybe I should come back here once in a while and have a little chat about movies. Not all the time, but every so often.

And if I'm going to do something resembling a comeback, I might as well do it by talking about a recent movie featuring another comeback, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.

Much like how I never really thought I'd come back to this blog, I also never would've expected a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, especially since it's been so long since it was released. I absolutely adore the original movie, and while I fully anticipated its sequel being nowhere near as good as the first one, I still held out hope that it would at least be able to recapture at least a little bit of the original's magic. But while there are moments that are a good bit of fun, Spinal Tap II feels less like a full-fledged sequel and more like an 83-minute epilogue that should've only ran half that time.

Four decades have passed since filmmaker Marty DeBergi (Rob Reiner) followed the heavy metal band Spinal Tap as they toured the United States to promote their then-recent album Smell the Glove. The subsequent documentary proved very popular, bringing Spinal Tap success they'd never seen before. But after a while, they went their separate ways and haven't spoken to one another in fifteen years. But the fates have aligned to bring Spinal Tap back together one last time.

We learn as the movie begins that the daughter of the band's now-deceased former manager has inherited a contract as part of her father's estate that requires one more concert from them. The contract was thought worthless at first, but then interest in Spinal Tap's music spiked after a video of country music legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood covering one of the band's old hits went viral online. And thus, Marty is tasked with following the misadventures of lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) as they come out of retirement for one last show in New Orleans.

If you didn't catch it from the introduction, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is not what I hoped it would be. The charm of the original movie just plain isn't there this time around. While the main threesome continue to blend well together, as they've recorded two albums and done live performances as their characters since the release of the first movie (some of which is actually depicted in Spinal Tap II itself), much of the energy we saw in 1984 doesn't seem to be there.

For example, the bit about Spinal Tap's residence in New Orleans also being a prime spot for a ghost hunting tour honestly isn't that funny. The scene where the band auditions drummers feels like it went on for longer than it probably should've, when the whole thing is just a callback to the first movie's joke about the band's numerous ill-fated drummers. A number of musicians have cameos that just seem superfluous, and a scene about Spinal Tap creating their own version of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a punchline that feels like it was ripped off from Zoolander.

There are also parts that I wish had been elaborated upon. The concert's promoter admits early in the movie that he literally knows nothing about music despite promoting concerts being his job, and one scene near the end makes makes him feel like he could've been a potential antagonist. But he's a non-factor for practically the whole movie. I also thought the way Spinal Tap's lives had gone in different directions and why they hadn't spoken in fifteen years could've added a little more to the movie, Michael and Nigel butt heads briefly during the third act, and that's it as far as that goes. C'mon, fellas, just give me a little something.

I so dearly wanted to like Spinal Tap II. I'd been looking forward to seeing it as soon as it was first announced. But now that I have, I feel underwhelmed. It does not in any way tarnish the first movie, but the sequel is largely disappointing. There's an argument to be made that it probably didn't even need to be made at all. At one point during the movie, Michael McKean's character describes the band's impromptu jam session with Paul McCartney as “a thrill I wish I could enjoy more.” I can say the same about Spinal Tap II.

Final Rating: **

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is often heralded as a classic part of the horror genre. The movies that followed it, on the other hand, have been all over the place in terms of quality. Between the sequels, the prequels, the 2003 remake, and the 3D reboot, the saga of Leatherface and his family has been nothing short of weird.

And things just got a bit weirder with the release of a new entry in the franchise having just landed on Netflix. Another "re-quel," as the fifth Scream movie would call it, this new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie is a direct sequel to Hooper's movie from 1974. And I won't lie to you: you're better off skipping it altogether.

Welcome to Harlow, a ghost town in Texas that has caught the eye of young entrepreneur Dante Spivey (Jacob Latimore). He and his colleague Melody (Sarah Yarkin), along with Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) and Melody's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher), have traveled to Harlow with plans to auction off the town's abandoned buildings and turn it into a hip, trendy, gentrified neighborhood. But things don't always go to plan, do they?

Dante and Melody discover an elderly woman in the town's orphanage, and she swears she's the rightful owner of the building. The subsequent argument causes the woman to have a heart attack and die, something that doesn't sit well with the orphanage's other resident: the masked murderer Leatherface (Mark Burnham). He goes back to doing what he does best, drawing the attention of Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré) in the process. Sally was the sole survivor of Leatherface's killing spree in 1974, and she's spent the last fifty years dedicated to finding and killing him. But as the original movie asked, who will survive and what will be left of them?

This is not a good movie. There's no beating around the bush. It's a dull, plodding effort that has a lot of gore but not much else going for it. It isn't scary, the characters are unbelievably bland, and is pretty much borrowing ideas wholesale from the 2018 Halloween, but didn't even do anything cool with the idea.

Director David Blue Garcia doesn't really do much to make the movie feel special. There's precious little that stands out or brings anything to the franchise. It's just a generic, paint-by-numbers slasher movie that lucked into having Leatherface as its main villain. There are no real scares, no suspense, nothing to make it worth watching beyond its name. Garcia does give us a couple of slick moments, but they're so few and far between that one would almost swear they were imagining them.

The movie also suffers from a very, very, very weak script. Credited to Chris Thomas Devlin, from a story by  Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, the script doesn't really tell any story worth following. Nobody is going into a movie titled "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" expecting Hemmingway-level writing, but it could've been so much better. The characters are all either boring, unlikable, or infuriatingly stupid, to the point that you don't want to root for anyone to survive. But that's not the worst of it.

For starters, one character is stated to have survived a school shooting. Was this something that got added to make the movie feel somewhat topical? Because using something seriously tragic like that as the backstory for a character in a crappy Netflix slasher movie just screams "poor taste."

And I can't mention stupid things in this movie without mentioning the bus scene. I've seen this scene brought up in numerous discussions about the movie, and I'm not surprised. It's probably the movie's most impressive set piece. But my problem is what happens just as the scene begins. Leatherface climbs aboard a party bus full of hipsters live-streaming the whole thing on social media, and this lumbering brute covered in blood, carrying a chainsaw, and wearing someone else's face as a mask is told by someone, "Try anything and you're canceled, bro." Holy crap. I think we actually found something that can rival "do your thing, cuz" from Texas Chainsaw 3D for one of the goofiest things I've ever seen in a horror movie. I can forgive some of the things people would call "woke," like characters wanting to remove a Confederate flag from one building. But this "cancel culture" joke just came off as the stupidest thing in a movie full of stupid things.

I also thought the idea of bringing Sally Hardesty back could've been handled a lot better. It's already bad enough that they're ripping off Halloween, but the character is only in the movie for roughly ten minutes. Her scenes weren't nearly as interesting as Laurie Strode's in Halloween, lacking a lot of the emotional weight her scenes probably should've had. You actually care about Laurie because she actually feels like she has a personality in all her appearances, as opposed to Sally. When the late Marilyn Burns played her in 1974, all she had to do was run and scream, that's it. This time around, the Sally played by Olwen Fouéré doesn't get to do much beyond hate Leatherface. And honestly, the whole thing was done way better earlier in the franchise, all the way back in the second movie when Dennis Hopper played a crazed Texas Ranger seeking revenge for members of his family that had been killed by Leatherface's clan.

But maybe the cast could overcome the rest of the movie's faults? No, no, a whole lot of nope. There isn't a single solitary performance among the cast that rises above mediocre. I did think Mark Burnham had an intimidating presence as Leatherface, and I'd have liked to see more of what Olwen Fouéré could have done as Sally had she been given more than ten minutes of screen time. But everybody else is just disposable cannon fodder and it seems like the cast knew it. Was there nobody here that could've done a little bit more with what they were given? I know it's a straight-to-Netflix slasher movie, but that isn't too much to ask, is it?

I won't lie, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies have never really been up my alley. I do like some of them, but they've always been overshadowed in my mind by the ones I didn't like. And this was one of the ones I didn't. Outside of some impressive gore effects, everything about it felt like generic retreads of things that had been done better in other movies. It gives off the impression that someone at Legendary Pictures said, "we've got the rights, we've gotta do something with it or we've spent all that money for nothing," before just dumping it on Netflix. It's a short watch, only 74 minutes before the credits roll. But what an unimpressive 74 minutes that is. After the last few movies, maybe the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise should just be left alone for a while.

Final Rating: **

Jackass Forever (2022)

When it was released in 2002, I assumed that Jackass: The Movie was going to be their grand finale, where they'd finally be able to do all the ridiculous R-rated shenanigans that they wouldn't have been able to air on their MTV show before riding off into the sunset. But here we are, over two decades since the show began, talking about the fourth in a line of Jackass movies. (Or even the fifth, if you want to count Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa in there.) It's been twelve years since we last saw this group of weirdos and daredevils in Jackass 3D, and I honestly thought that we'd never see them in this capacity again. But considering how weird the last two or three years have been, nothing should really surprise me anymore.

But there are a few surprises out there, and some of them are in Jackass Forever. Much of the original gang — Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, "Danger Ehren" McGhehey, Preston Lacy, and Jason "Wee-Man" Acuña  — are back for more, and they've brought along newbies Sean "Poopies" McInerney, Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin, Rachel Wolfson, and Eric Manaka to help them out. The whole group of daredevils are here to perform more of the dangerous, outrageous, and sometimes disgusting stunts that we know and love Jackass for. And truth be told, some of these stunts are taken to a much higher, sometimes scarier degree than we've seen from them in the past.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't really know if this particular movie was quite as funny as what we've seen in the past. Yeah, it's got some moments that are laugh-out-loud hilarious, but they didn't feel as if they came as often as what we might've seen in the first three Jackass movies or the TV show. I honestly spent more time worrying about the cast's safety than I did laughing. Seeing Johnny Knoxville strapped to a stretcher and carted to a waiting ambulance with broken bones and a concussion, or briefly catching a glimpse of Steve-O with his arm in a sling (from a stunt that didn't even make it into the final cut of the movie!) seem more scary than they might've been twenty years ago when Jackass first got started. And then there's the fact that you can only see someone get hit in the testicles so many times before the humor wears off, right?

Some of the stunts are them recreating bits from the show and first movie but amped up to a more extreme degree, for better or worse. A lot of times, it just comes off like they're just doing things that were funnier earlier. It's like the kid in school who gets a laugh out of something, and keeps doing it over and over until you're tired of it.

The group's passion for their work and the camaraderie between them is more than evident, which makes a lot of the movie just as heartwarming as it is funny and gross. But at the same time, the absences of Bam Margera and the late Ryan Dunn are definitely felt here, and I didn't feel like the rookies made quite as big an impact as they could've. Rachel Wolfson in particular barely feels like she's in the movie at all, beyond two or three scenes. Zach Holmes and Poopies (what an unfortunate nickname that is!) seem to be given more than the rest, though I'd have really liked to see more of the whole group of them rather than just once in a while.

There's some genuinely funny moments to be had in Jackass Forever, especially if you're already a fan. And there's plenty of silliness to be found as well. But something about it just didn't feel the same as it used to. Maybe the time for Jackass has finally passed? I don't know if I'm the one to say that, and I won't lie, I'd totally see a fifth movie if they made one. But there's just something about this particular one that feels like it's missing, and I don't really know what it is. Maybe Jackass is funnier in my memory? But I'd probably just recommend Jackass Forever to the hardcore fans, and that's it. If you're not a fan, this probably won't convert you. And the haunting thing? I could probably see them doing this all again in another ten years. God help them if we ever see Jackass 5.

Final Rating: **½

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

When the Paranormal Activity movies seemingly came to an end in 2015, part of me hoped that the franchise would stay dead and buried. As much as I enjoyed the first three, the later sequels were so unbearably bad that the whole thing just stopped being fun to watch. And I don't think I'm the only one that felt that way, considering the continually diminishing box office returns of each successive entry into the series.

You can't always get what you want, however. Six years after The Ghost Dimension closed the book on on Toby the demon's found footage adventures, the Paranormal Activity name has been resurrected with a movie released exclusively to the Paramount+ streaming service. And truth be told, I'd have had no idea this new chapter, subtitled Next of Kin, was even being released at all if I hadn't seen someone mention it on Twitter this morning. I haven't seen that first commercial or advertisement or anything for it. So between that and my displeasure with what the franchise turned into over time, I can't say I'm actually really excited for it. But what the heck, it's the spooky season, after all. So why don't we check it out and hope for the best?

The movie centers around Margot (Emily Bader), a young woman from Arizona who was abandoned by her mother when she was a baby. She's spent much of her life wondering about her biological family she's never known, wondering why her mother gave her up, and has spent much of her life searching for answers. She eventually makes some progress, however, when she's contacted by Samuel Bailer (Henry Ayers-Brown), who has recently left the Amish community he grew up in. Samuel discovered that Margot is his cousin through an online DNA testing service and offers to take her to his old community so that she can finally meet her biological family.

Accompanied by cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) so that she can document her search for her past, Margot travels to rural New York and is introduced to Jacob (Tom Nowicki), the Bailer family patriarch and her biological grandfather. Jacob offers them a room for a few days, and while Chris and Dale try capturing some of the local flavor, Margot goes off in search of answers for questions she's had all her life. But the deeper she digs, the closer she comes to learning that some mysteries should stay unsolved.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is not a particularly good movie. It takes cues not just from the past movies in the series with the occasional cheap jump scare, but from the horror flicks released by A24 in recent years. Movies like Robert Eggers' The Witch or Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar, flicks that are less dependent on jump scares and more focused on building an esoteric sense of dread. (And cults, can't forget the cults.) The big difference is that Next of Kin isn't nearly as good as those movies. It isn't even as good as the previous movies in its own franchise. Any effective scares to be found are few and far between, and the rest is nothing that hasn't been seen in a hundred other horror movies. It doesn't even bring anything new to this franchise beyond changing the setting from suburban California to a farm in New York. It's a dull, ultimately pointless movie that's only worth watching if you've run out of any other scary movies to watch this Halloween weekend.

Director William Eubank doesn't really do much to garner any sort of enthusiasm, or suspense, or any sort of reaction at all from the audience. I'm not even really sure Eubank knew what kind of movie he really wanted to make. There's a ton of odd editing choices, a handful of scenes (especially during the climax) that suddenly go into slow motion for a few seconds, and even a bit near the end of the movie that looks like it was shot traditionally instead of in the handheld "found footage" style.

I can't emphasize that last part enough, either. The movie already looks really slick thanks to it being established that the characters are using high end cameras instead of consumer grade camcorders like in the other movies, but there are times where the "found footage" concept is betrayed with camera angles that they couldn't possibly have gotten had the cast been shooting it themselves like the cast would have you believe. That's jarring enough, but when we get to one sequence near the end of the movie where nobody is holding a camera (as far as I could tell, anyway) and things are still shot perfectly for about sixty seconds, it takes me right out of the movie. I can forgive Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and [REC] 3 for pivoting from found footage to traditional filmmaking halfway through because they actually address it. But here's it's painfully out of place and makes Eubank look lazy.

He isn't helped by the lackluster script, either. Writer Christopher Landon has worked on four of the movies in the series, so you'd think he could come up with something, anything, to shake things up. If you're gonna reboot the franchise, give us something fresh. But nope, he doesn't. Outside of the change in setting I've already mentioned, Landon doesn't give us anything new. The characters are either boring or forgettable (or both), with only Dale the sound guy having anything even remotely resembling a personality.

There's also very little time given to building any sort of nuance or depth to the villains' master plan. It just goes from Margot and Chris discovering some a few strange clues and saying "huh, this is kinda weird," some more clues that prompt a "this is really weird" reaction from Margot, and then we immediately run into the climax with no real build toward anything outside of one or two throwaway lines about what's happening as we're running at 100 miles an hour towards the conclusion. Combining this with a predictable open ending, you get the feeling that Landon just figured he'd give us the bare minimum and fill in the blanks if he has to write a sequel rather than giving us a fully fleshed-out story.

And then there's the cast, who are just as forgettable as everything else in Next of Kin. Dan Lippert has a few fun moments as the movie's comic relief, and that's the best thing I can really say about anybody. Emily Bader does an okay enough job despite her character having practically no depth whatsoever, and the vibe I got from Tom Nowicki was that they wish they could've hired Clancy Brown to play the role instead, and that's about all I really have to say about the cast. They're all just kinda there.

If you've seen literally any of the other Paranormal Activity movies, even the unofficial Japanese spinoff or the Asylum's ripoff, you've seen Next of Kin too. There's absolutely nothing here that improves or builds upon the same old formula that was worn out when the last movie came out in 2015, nothing that reinvents the series or makes this particular one worth watching. It seems appropriate that this went directly to a streaming app without much fanfare, because it's exactly the kind of movie that would have gone straight to video and faded into obscurity while collecting dust on a shelf at Blockbuster ten years ago. If you're desperate to watch any scary movie, give this a watch, I guess. But take my word for it, you're not missing anything if you don't.

Final Rating: **