The violence isn't scary, nor is much else, but it's still better than the convoluted backstory.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is a supernatural horror film based on a video game, of astonishing clumsiness and crudeness. No, the film isn't fun in a so-bad-it's-good way. It's just plain bad, perhaps even worse than the first one. The "monsters" are fun to look at, at least for a few minutes: they're ten-foot-tall metal animatronic mascots that escape from the grimy ruins of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, an abandoned children's birthday party venue.
Director: Emma Tammi
Writer: Scott Cawthon
Stars: Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio, Elizabeth Lail
They can be menacing, but they're not particularly frightening, and the director, Emma Tammi (returning from the first film), presents the violence in such a sanitized way that it feels like you're watching a TV-censored version of a horror movie, with all the interesting parts removed.
This isn't accidental. One of the reasons “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was such a massive hit two years ago is that it was the definition of a PG-13 horror movie: not edgy enough, not scary enough, but just appealing enough in terms of brand and concept to attract millions of underage video game fans.
At one point in “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” Chica (voiced by Megan Fox), the giant animatronic chicken with false eyelashes and the phrase "Let's party!" written on her shirt, stalks a high school teacher (Wayne Knight) on the night of the science fair. "What I want is to see what's inside your head," she says right before she squeezes his brains out, although the scene is so unexplicit that it's completely abstract. "Just what I thought," says Chica. "There's nothing in there!"
There's nothing in the film's head either. It's just silly horror jokes for kids, although the madness of this fan-service mess is that the film gets completely bogged down in its convoluted backstory. In 1982, 20 years before the events of “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” we see a party at Freddy’s, where a young girl, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie), knew something was wrong. She watched as a little boy was kidnapped by Freddy, the teddy bear mascot, and despite her desperate pleas, all the parents present ignored her. (The way this is staged is so implausible that it steers the film toward pure B-movie territory.)
It turned out that Freddy was a serial killer in disguise, the same one played by Matthew Lillard in the first film. (Lillard appears in the new film for a few minutes.) Charlotte rescued the boy, but in doing so, she died; she died in front of everyone at the party. Now her spirit has merged with the Puppet, an animatronic mascot that looks like a kabuki version of Jigsaw. It is this merged demon that is causing all the trouble.
Josh Hutcherson returns as Mike, the former security guard at Freddy’s, who spends much of the new film staring at a computer screen. Piper Rubio returns as Abby, Mike’s younger sister, who had befriended the mascots and still thinks of them as her friends; it’s her desire to reconnect with the child ghosts inhabiting them that sets the story in motion. (That’s also the kind of plot complication that can give you a headache.) And the attractive Elizabeth Lail returns as Vanessa, the serial killer’s daughter (the film seems to have forgotten that she’s a police officer), who might be getting romantically involved with Mike.
All of this happens simply because the film, written by Scott Cawthorn (creator of the Freddy’s video game empire), needs things to happen between the weakly staged attacks by the mascots. But we barely care; it’s the gears of B-movie filmmaking grinding away as “world-building.” At one point, it’s revealed that the shiny, towering mascots are less powerful than the grimy, damaged prototype versions found in Freddy’s basement. In 2021, two years before the film adaptation of "Five Nights at Freddy's" was released, there was an independent horror-comedy film called "Willy's Wonderland" that was a complete rip-off of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" concept.
It starred Nicolas Cage as a drifter who gets stranded in a small town, where he's forced to spend the night cleaning the titular establishment. The attacks by the animatronic mascots in that film were genuinely violent (and ten times more inventive than those in the "Freddy's" movies), and Cage, who literally didn't utter a single word throughout the entire film, had such charisma that he made the act of cleaning hypnotically satisfying. "Willy's Wonderland" grossed a total of $450,000 at the box office, but it was a clever and captivatingly campy horror film.
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