In short: Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a fashionably traumatized guy taking care of his neurodivergent sister (Piper Rubio), gets a job as a night-watchman at something called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a half-ruined establishment that still harbours some working weird animatronic more-than-human sized animals. Alas, those somewhat creepy looking things are possessed by the souls of dead children and can get rather murderous.

I’m neither a fan of the FNAF games nor am I part of their – and most probably this film’s – intended audience. This is clearly made with entry level horror viewers or fans of the game franchise in mind, but I do believe the former deserve a more interesting and coherent movie. The film’s script is a total mess, with subplots and characters that often don’t feel as if they were written with kids as an audience in mind but actually written by one – the whole business about Mike’s aunt’s attempts at getting hold of Abby is particularly embarrassing – whereas Mike’s trauma scenes seem to belong into a completely different movie.

Some of the horror scenes are effective enough for what they are – director Emma Tammi can do better as we know – and the animatronic animals look pretty great in motion, but there’s no flow, no character and no personality to either the filmmaking or the film itself, leaving this not just as a product, but as a deeply mediocre product with little of interest to it. Kids deserve a better entry drug.

Three Films Make A Post: A Scotch Mist...A Girl Never Kissed...A Yank Who Missed...and Landed HIGH AND DRY

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020): After the actually watchable first Babysitter, this is a step back into his old crappiness for director McG(odawful). The film’s more a compilation of badly realized and badly staged pop culture references, with a script that interrupts any scene that should be perfectly entertaining when just left alone for some smug “joke” that’s generally about as funny as getting murdered. The final act is total catastrophe, the film pretending it has emotional character arcs (it would need actual characterisation for that) and going for an ending that’s supposed to connect this one better with the first film but mostly feels random and shoe-horned in to get the most out of a shooting day with Samara Weaving.
And please don’t get me started on the thing’s tendency to point out that it has just made a joke, suggesting the filmmakers believe their audience consists of actual cave dwelling monkeys. It’s genuinely dreadful.

The Wind (2018): A completely different kind of film is this piece directed by Emma Tammi. Told slowly and out of chronological order, it isn’t the easiest film to get into or understand initially, but a fantastic performance by Caitlin Gerard, wonderfully creepy and beautiful shots of wide, empty plains and fields do ease one nicely into the uncanny atmosphere. It’s a tale of the supernatural and of madness that keeps things just ambiguous enough to work, exploring the uneasiness of the settler in a very strange land with particular emphasis on the strains this kind of life puts on women.

It’s also an insightful psychological portrait of a murderer, using the strange and the supernatural, mental illness and delusions as ways to understand things difficult to.

The ‘Maggie’ aka High and Dry (1954): This British comedy by Alexander Mackendrick has obvious parallels to the brilliant I Know Where I’m Going, but without that film’s undertow of the mythical, and does not quite reaches its heights. That’s not a shame, really, for not being Shakespeare doesn’t after all necessarily mean you’re a bad playwright. At the very least, the film is funny, using certain clichés about Scots and Scots working class people in contrast to an American businessman with American business work ethics without getting preachy or embarrassing about it.


But then, when the film isn’t setting up its jokes, it does spend so much time and love on its characters that they stop being short hands for ideas or butts of jokes and become people, the film genuinely trying to understand where everyone is coming for, what got them there, and what they might learn from each other. That’s so not 2020, but really rather refreshing.