Five Nights at Freddy’s: This horror makes Willy’s Wonderland seem an underappreciated masterpiece

Somewhere in the second act of lockdown, Nicolas Cage – who else? – turned up in a shamelessly dumb video-on-demand release called Willy’s Wonderland. Our favourite vest-wearer, employed as a janitor in an abandoned amusement arcade, found himself fighting possessed animatronic characters apparently modelled on those from the Chuck E Cheese food franchise. The film wasn’t exactly good. But, as you’d expect with such a scenario, it knew to play the action up for the broadest laughs.

Now we get this deeply puzzling, tonally bananas take on a clever video game whose influence on Willy’s Wonderland more than a few culturally astute critics noted at the time. Josh Hutcherson (who, somehow or other, is now 31) plays Mike, a troubled man living in guilty misery with his young sister. We soon learn he has never recovered from the apparent abduction of the siblings’ infant brother. Mistaking a passerby for the kidnapper in a shopping mall, he beats the stranger half to death and finds himself nearly unemployable. Meanwhile, his money-grabbing aunt (welcome back, Mary Stuart Masterson) is trying to secure custody of his nervy sister. Well that doesn’t sound much like fun. That sounds as if Ken Loach got hold of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Eventually, like the Cagester, Mike secures a job in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a defunct family-fun emporium, and, after a few uneasy nights, is thrown in conflict with giant robot bipeds who become murderous after midnight. Sadly, the film still doesn’t lighten up. We are still stuck in an awful scuffed nightmare that looks to be reifying our protagonist’s existential trauma. Hutcherson is admirably committed to the film-makers’ apparent desire to make something miserable of a scenario that, as one Oscar-winning actor has shown, is more accommodating of psychedelic comedy. Josh furrows his brow and rumbles his vowels. So do we as we try to make sense of what we are being sold.

The film has, one must guess, ended up this way as a result of efforts to honour the game’s grim backstory. The closest thing to a decent joke comes (I think) in a closing reference, at one or two removes, to a popular television show of the early 1970s. This bewildering exercise’s only other notable achievement is to make Willy’s Wonderland seem an underappreciated masterpiece. It really wasn’t.