SYNOPSIS: In “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” a new horror film based on the popular videogame and now playing in theatres, eleven-year-old Abby (Piper Rubio) sneaks away from her protective brother Mike (Josh Hutcherson) to reunite with her pals, four Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza animatronic mascots who are possessed by the spirits of the children who disappeared during Fazbear’s glory days.
CAST: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, and Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Wayne Knight, Mckenna Grace, and Teo Briones. Directed by Emma Tammi.
REVIEW: To begin, let’s start at the end. ”Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” wraps up with an obvious set-up for another film. No spoilers here, but it explains why the movie feels like a means to an end, literally. By that I mean the entire convoluted story feels like a trailer for the franchise’s next movie.
It’s a shame the film delivers little more than jump scares because it kicks off with an interesting premise.
The animatronic action begins in 1982 at a birthday party at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place. As young Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie) patiently waits for her favorite character to appear, she spots a little boy being dragged out of the party by yellow animatronic rabbit Spring Bonnie (Matthew Lillard). She prevents the kidnapping, but winds up a victim of The Marionette, a terrifying puppet with a white mask, a wide grin and painted on rosy, red cheeks.
Cut to 2002. It’s a year after Fazbear security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) discovered the pizza joint’s animatronic mascots, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy, are possessed by the spirits of the children who disappeared during Fazbear’s glory days and had their eyes on a new victim, Mike’s innocent sister Abby (Piper Rubio).
With the help of Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a police officer (and daughter of serial killer William Afton, played by Matthew Lillard), Abby was spared, but now Abby feels a connection to the animatronic meanies and wants to reconnect. “She misses her friends,” says Mike. Trouble is, that makes her a target for The Marionette.
After a strong start, and the addition of the creepy Marionette, it’s a shame the rest of the movie relies on jump scares and toothless violence instead of the inventive horror of the first fifteen minutes.
The character design by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is top notch, hitting the right balance between kid friendly animatronics and threatening evil robots. They’re a blast. Take for instance Chica (Megan Fox), a large animatronic chicken with “Let’s Party” emblazoned on her t-shirt, who gleefully squeezes Wayne Knight’s head with the words, “Let’s see what’s going on inside your head. Just what I thought! Nothing in there at all!” It’s the kind of fun PG-13 horror that offers relief from the movie’s reliance on jump scares.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s” devotees will find loads of fan service and Easter eggs, but audiences hoping for real horror will find the movie to be as stale as a decade old slice from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the original “Scream,” starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell and Drew Barrymore, reinvented the slasher genre with a scary, funny and self-reverential take on things that go stab in the night.
Three sequels later, there’s a new edition, the inventively titled “Scream.” It’s the fifth film in the series, and they’re not calling it a sequel. It is, God help us, a relaunch, or, as they call it in the movie, a “requel.”
A mix of new and old characters, “Scream” takes place in Woodsboro, California, a sleepy little town whose peace and quiet was interrupted twenty-five years ago by a killer in the now iconic Ghostface mask.
The action in the new film gets underway as a new Ghostface killer sets their sights, and knife, on Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), a teenage senior at Woodsboro High who enjoys “elevated horror.” (MILD SPOILER) Unlike the opening scene characters before her, Tara survives and is tended to by older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) whose thorny history with Ghostface makes the pair a target for the masked killer.
As Ghostface’s killing spree continues, Sam turns to the old guard, Dewey Riley (David Arquette), television morning show host Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), for help.
“Scream” is much cleverer than the retread title and recycled killer would suggest. It continues the meta commentary on the rules characters in slasher movies must abide by if they expect to survive the knife but, more than that, it plays like a satire of itself. It’s a trickly line to walk but directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett stay the course.
As the killer carves notches on his belt, characters talk about “elevated horror,” and toxic fandom until the line between what the characters are talking about and what we’re watching on screen blurs into one bloody riff on postmodern horror and what it really means to be a “requel.” It is simultaneously self-reverential and mocking of the slasher genre, and values its cleverness as much as the kills that provide the scares.
The scary scenes don’t have quite the same atmosphere Wes Craven brought to his “Scream” instalments, but there are moments that linger in the memory. The old trope of revealing the killer behind an opening door is played for laughs and tension, and the loss of one of the “legacy” characters is actually kind of touching.
As expected, the killings are brutal and bloody, and mostly not played for laughs. The new “Scream” is the most gruesome film in the franchise, offering up piercing knives and gallons of pouring plasma. There are plot holes everywhere and the victims have usually done something to out themselves in harm’s way, but the killings are effectively played out.
“Scream” is a slasher movie that bends the rules of slasher movies but, best of all, it also breaks the sequel rule of diminishing returns. Adding a fifth entry to an established franchise, that holds up to the original, may be the movie’s biggest achievement.
“Finch,” the new Tom Hanks dystopian drama now streaming on Apple TV+, feels like a mix of “Castaway” and “Short Circuit.”
Set in the near future, the movie takes place in a world where a catastrophic solar flare devastated the planet. 140° Fahrenheit temperatures are commonplace and most people are dead, burned to a crisp, leaving behind desiccated corpses. Those who are left, like Finch (Hanks) must scavenge for food and supplies. Finch, an engineer and inventor, lives in a bunker with his best (and only) friend, a cute dog named Goodyear.
When he isn’t driving around in his armored vehicle—a giant RV with solar panels—exploring the burned-out area around his home for any morsels that might have been left behind, he is working in the lab, building a robot.
Finch isn’t tinkering with the droid to pass the time. He’s sick, slowly dying of radiation poisoning and building a machine to care for Goodyear once he is unable.
Slapped together with spare parts, the robot (Caleb Landry Jones), with his elongated face and camera lens eyes, is a gangly contraption, childlike in his awareness of the strange new world to which he is introduced.
As Finch’s health worsens so does the situation outside his doors. As temperatures rise and the weather becomes more and more unstable, Finch, Goodyear and the robot, who goes by the name Jeff, hit the road headed toward San Francisco.
The trip is fraught with danger and made no less easy by Jeff’s learning curve. He’s not always the droid Finch is looking for. “I know you were born yesterday,” says an exasperated Finch, “but I need for you to grow up!”
Despite the high tech aspects of the story—the robotics and mysterious cause of the dystopia—“Finch” is an old fashioned movie. The action sequences are old school, man-against-nature style, as Finch and his rag tag team battle tornadoes, UV radiation and extreme weather in the hellish post-apocalyptic wasteland.
More than that, “Finch” is not really about the robot. It’s about making a connection, human or otherwise, determination and legacy.
Ensuring that the movie has some heart and soul is Hanks. He’s in virtually every frame of the film, and his empathic likability shines through. There’s not a lot of backstory—any background is told in the form of stories to teach Jeff a life lesson—but Hanks, through his expressive eyes provides all the details we need.
Landry Jones, in a motion capture performance, brings a great deal of heart and humour to the mechanical Jeff as he figures out the nuts-and-bolts of day-to-day life. The father and son bond between he and Finch brings both the joy and sorrow of relationships to the fore and goes beyond the usual buddy movie clichés into something deeper.
“Finch” is a different kind of post-apocalyptic movie. In fact, it may be the most jovial end of the world flick ever. Finch and Jeff lightheartedly joust back and forth, which leads to some sappy moments but at the end of the day it’s about their relationship. And let’s face it, if Hanks could make us care about a volleyball in “Castaway” he can make you fall for a CGI robot.
