Five Nights at Freddy's (film): I couldn't finish the movie... it's pretty bad

I am a big fan of the horror genre in a general sense and am always on the lookout for something unusual. Since I am a child of the 80's and have been to a pizza parlor called Showbiz Pizza that had animatronic robots just like the ones that are featured in this movie, it looked like it had potential to be something interesting. Unfortunately that simply isn't the case and the overall story that they get into end up being kind of dumb and the jump scares just aren't enough to do it for me.

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I suppose the idea of being stalked and killed by possessed animatronic robots that look cute can be scary but this is really the only thing that the film has going for it and it gets overused pretty quickly and stops being scary and you really just start to have a feeling of "get on with it already" after about 40 minutes.

The pacing of the film is something that had me and a lot of other regular and professional critics upset about this movie. The animatronic robots are obviously the feature of the film, but they need a reason to have them come to life and kill people and unfortunately, the reason is just kind of dumb as well as awfully convenient that this particular person (Mike) just happens to take a job as the night watchman at this particular run-down restaurant that conveniently still has most of the electronics intact despite being closed for years.

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There's only so much that can be done with robot teddy bears stalking and killing people in a tiny pizza parlor and this just stops being interesting very quickly. I think it could have been made a bit better with more gore, but for some reason they wanted to make this a PG-13 film presumably to attract a younger audience to the cinemas.

The movie is pretty terrible in my mind but you can't argue with the marketing tactics. On a budget of merely $20 million they made over $200 million globally up to this point so I would imagine that Universal Pictures is perfectly ok with the almost entirely negative reception that it has received.

Should I watch it?

Not only do I think you shouldn't watch it, I'd be surprised if you can actually make it all the way through it because it is just so damned boring. If you were a fan of the video games, which I never played, perhaps it would serve as some sort of fan service but even in that situation I doubt it. It's been a while since I have been this bored by a film and therefore think it should be avoided. Watch basically anything else.