📆 Opens wide on Friday, October 27th
Ever wanted to hang out with Chuck E. Cheese and the Make Believe Band? Seem like a swell group of anthropomorphic folks. Good music, okay pizza, probably decades worth of stories to share. Well, too bad! They’re a murderous lot who will haunt the halls of their themed restaurant/arcade and take you down if you’re not paying attention.
Welcome to Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on the long-running video games series. Josh Hutcherson (our sweet little Peeta from The Hunger Games) plays Mike Schmidt, the newest nighttime security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Seems a pretty easy gig: Show up at midnight, sit in an office, watch the security cameras, make sure nothing seems off, and a few hours later you’re done. But something inside the animatronic animals makes them move on their own. Makes them…hunt. And they’re coming for Schmidt.
The film version comes from the highly successful Blumhouse production house, with director Emma Tammi at the helm. (She previously made the spine-tinglingly effective but sorely underseen western chiller The Wind.) This time, she’s playing the realm of PG-13 horror, and it’s primed to become a solid bit of gateway horror. By that I mean things like Gremlins, the work of Henry Selick, the first film version of The Witches, the OG Poltergeist, and Return to Oz. All were ostensibly made for a family audience, and all freaked out young, impressionable me when I was a lad.
So as the wise tweet once said, “Come on down for some rat pizza at our child casino,” and see if you can survive five nights at… Well, you know.
