‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Gets Grim Reviews

Five Nights at Freddy’s, a movie based on a frightful video game, premieres on Peacock October 27. The film is in theaters as well.

Five Nights at Freddy’s follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, a formerly hot Chuck E. Cheese-style hangout that has since closed. While spending his first night on the job, he encounters some animatronic interlopers with a score to settle.

Josh Hutcherson stars, along with Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Kat Conner Sterling, Mary Stuart Masterson and Matthew Lillard.

Emma Tammi directs. She wrote the screenplay with Scott Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback. Cawthon created the video game.

Blumhouse, producer of M3gan, The Black Phone and other horror movies, produces Five Nights. Jason Blum and Cawthon produce. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop created the movie’s animatronic characters.

Reviews are mostly unkind. A review in Variety called the movie “listless and repetitive.”

It continues, “Despite being shepherded by savvy low-budget horror producer Jason Blum, this is a rather empty and unexciting effort at attracting horror fans during Halloween season.”

The Guardian called the film “maddeningly dull.”

It reads, “There are five nights to be survived at cursed old pizza spot Freddy Fazbear’s yet it feels like an awful lot more in this surprisingly flat attempt to turn a hit video game into a hit movie. At a flabby, sign-of-the-times 110 minutes, there’s far too much of so many things — dream sequences, exposition, first-act buildup — and far too little of what one would naturally expect from something as surface-level silly as this — fun.”

The Daily Beast, for its part, said the movie “isn’t worth a single evening.”