‘Five Nights At Freddy’s’ Is Getting Panned By Critics — Here’s What They’re Saying

With Halloween just a few days away and no new horror movies coming, it's a good bet that Five Nights at Freddy's, adapted from a much-beloved video game, will scare up some serious coin at the box office. But no one can say film critics didn't try to warn the movie-going public!

The (alleged) horror-comedy film, bereft of both scares and laughs, is currently tainted with a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. (And if you do some further inspection, you'll see that a lot of those "fresh" grades are just barely over that yes-or-no line — "mildly entertaining," as Russ Simmons of KKFI-FM puts it, is hardly a rave.)

The common complaint is that a movie about guitar-wielding Chuck E. Cheese-esque animatronic barnyard animals that go on a killing spree ought to be fun! Instead, the filmmakers decided to try for serious drama (seriously!) about dealing with past trauma and processing grief.

As a public service, The Messenger suggested five alternative movies that hit upon similar themes instead of wasting your dough on this latest one from the perhaps overly-prolific horror producer Jason Blum. (Indeed, his company Blumhouse is also behind the recent reboot dud The Exorcist: Believer.) In keeping with the pentalogic theme, here are five quotes from other critics that spells "game over" for this movie.

At The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote that Emma Tammi's film "clangs from straight-faced speeches about childhood trauma to cartoonish kids’ movie-level goofiness, tonally awkward and strangely, maddeningly dull, unravelling a mystery that’s as predictable as it is uninteresting." If you read that with Lee's British accent in your head, it even sounds worse!

Writing for the Associated Press, Mark Kennedy points out the "inadvertent comedy" of "one of the poorest films in any genre this year." A syndicated diss!

Adam Graham of The Detroit News calls the movie "maudlin, drab, tonally bizarre and thematically unintelligible," and says the video game adaptation "feels like a stark, vaguely supernatural family drama shoehorned into a franchise-ready piece of intellectual property." No love for the latest Blumhouse production in the Motor City!

Natalia Winkelman, writing for The New York Times, notes that audiences "may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you." Indeed, I can vouch that at the New York press screening, in addition to several audible yawns, the crowd did break out into derisive chuckles a few times.

Even Collider, a website that is usually forgiving to video game and "fanboy" fare, was unimpressed. Critic Chase Hutchinson called the film "a hollow skeleton," complaining that the screenplay suffered from "incessantly explaining itself and its backstory that it fe[lt] more like homework than horror."