Five Nights at Freddy's in 350 Words or Less

At a couple of points during Five Nights at Freddy's, the fresh Blumhouse film adaptation of the beloved video-game, the phrase "Saw Jr." popped into my head -- but sitting here to write about the movie I feel like actually calling it "Saw Jr." will be misleading for a couple of reasons. First off because that gives the movie more gore credit than its due -- it shies away from anything overly gruesome in order to stay PG-13. But I suppose that's where the "Jr." part comes in? So the more misleading aspect of me calling it "Saw Jr." is that you very much need to understand how deeply and profoundly I loathe the Saw films, and consider them all poorly made trash. So me saying "Saw Jr." will read to somebody who doesn't know that about me as perhaps a compliment. But if I call something Saw-adjacent that's meant the exact opposite of a positive. 

Five Nights at Freddy's is actually better than any Saw movie, I'll give it that -- the creepy creature design from Jim Henson Workshop that brings these lumbering Chuck-E.-Cheese-esque atrocities to life is a whole lot of fun, and that's more than could be said about any single thing put on-screen in any Saw movie. (Loved Cupcake.) But when you're not ogling those designs this movie is dull as a doornail and dead as dishwater, and the more it tries to explain itself the less any of it makes sense. It's morose and unscary and and so over-complicated backstory-wise that you'll feel as if you've been ground up in its gears by its end. There are whiffs here and there of what could have been -- loved the little girl hiding in the ball-pit for instance, but it's delivered with a total lack of tension, and like everything else here it just sits there. I thought the whole idea was these animitronic monsters were supposed to move, but they give life a bad name.