The haunted animatronic horrors of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria are back with a new puppeteer leader, the Marionette. This spirit-enlivened creature has one goal: Kill all parents. The movie mechs are crisp and creepy, but everything else is a mess—including smooshed noggins, twisted spirituality, spattered blood and nasty language (and an illogical, incomprehensible script).
When Mike Schmidt took a job as a night watchman at a closed Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, he had no idea of what might await him.
Mike didn’t know that a serial killer had once used that family eatery to hide his creepy menace. He didn’t know that the spirits of murdered children had been caught up in the dilapidated pizza joint’s animatronic mascots. He just knew that he needed some steady income to take care of his sister, Abby.
What Mike got was a supernatural nightmare.
Now, a year or so after those heinous things transpired, Mike is trying to put his and Abby’s life back together. He’s working to clean up an old house for their home, for one thing. He’s found Abby a good school. And Mike is kinda sorta seeing a pretty ex-cop named Vanessa, whom he met during his night watchman job.
Vanessa, well, turned out to be the aforementioned killer’s daughter. So, she’s trying to rid herself of the whole “my dad was a serial killer” trauma. And she does that by facing off with the spirit of her deceased dad. (Which is something that Mike doesn’t know about.)
In general, though, things are better now for everyone involved. Or at least, that’s what Mike is thinking.
What Mike also doesn’t know is that 11-year-old Abby isn’t doing so great. She can’t get her mind off the “friends” that she met during Mike’s work at Freddy’s. And by “friends” I mean the spirits of those murdered children who lived in the metal-and-gear animatronics: Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken and Foxy the Pirate Fox.
Those spirit-enlivened mechs were pretty bashed and broken by the end of Mike’s job at Freddy’s. And Abby wants to go back to Freddy’s to fix those animatronic shells so she can be with her besties once more.
What Mike, Vanessa and Abby all don’t know is that there’s someone else who wants Abby to go to that locked-up pizzeria.
Way back in the early ‘80s, an outcast girl named Charlotte was murdered in the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. And somehow that murdered girl’s spirit fused with an animatronic puppet unique to that first Freddy’s: the Marionette.
Now, Charlotte/Marionette wants Abby to visit the original Freddy’s and help her free all of the locked down animatronics. Then with the Marionette’s wireless control, Charlotte will wreak her revenge. And many will die.
Of course, Mike doesn’t know any of this is going on. But he will soon. And then the really creepy sauce will spill out.
Mike does his best to take care of his sister. And he apologizes when he realizes that his protective demands may seem a bit harsh. Vanessa tries to help Mike and Abby through some difficult situations, fighting on their behalf. When adults ignore a young girl’s pleas for help, the girl takes it upon herself to find and carry an unconscious boy to safety, putting her own life at risk.
Early on, we’re told that Abby is missing her friends, which turn out to be the spirits of five children who were murdered at Freddy’s. Those spirits bonded with the pizza shop’s animatronics. And while the first movie offered at least a cursory explanation of how that may have happened, there is none given here.
Mike calls on Abby’s ghostly friends to help her, and the five spirits animate Freddy’s robots and fight on her behalf. Later in the movie, when the mechs’ power runs out, one of the spirits steps forth in ghostly human form to talk to Abby. He says that they are now free and will “go to heaven.” He hopes to meet Abby there one day. Mike talks to Abby about her friends going to heaven as well.
Charlotte enlivens the Marionette and then possesses several humans—the victims’ faces taking on the animatronic facial markings and glowing eyes.
Abby tells her story about having robotic friends possessed by ghosts. Some kids don’t believe her, but one reasons that he believes in UFOs and ghosts, “So why not haunted animatronics?”
In the first movie, Mike used his dreams to relive memories in the hope of remembering who kidnapped his deceased brother. In this pic, Vanessa does much the same—but to confront her deceased father.
A trio of social media influencers called “Spectral Scoopers” go to the original Freddy’s pizzeria to investigate supernatural phenomena. They encounter several creepy, self-propelling doll creatures. And one of the influencers is possessed by an invasive spirit.
The father of a deceased girl laments not paying closer attention to her. “You can become so blind that you don’t see the devil sitting next to you,” he notes.
Abby wonders if Mike and Vanessa have kissed yet. But Mike assures Abby that his and Vanessa’s relationship is still on a “friend” level.
Scenes from the past show a young Charlotte watching a boy get lured into an “employees only” room at Freddy’s pizzeria. She tries to alert adults, but they ignore her. So she rescues the unconscious boy herself, getting stabbed in the back several times by a large knife in the process. We don’t see the knife blows land, but Charlotte staggers into an open area with large bloody spots on the back of her sweater and collapses. Then her bloody body ends up in the arms of one of the pizza shop’s animatronics while a crowd looks on and gasps.
A young woman gets possessed and later left for dead in a pile of trash. A large set of mechanical arms picks up a friend of hers by the throat and seemingly tears him in half (off-camera). Then the guy’s body squelches back down to the ground in two chunks (in the unfocused background of a fallen camera’s view). Another guy is pulled into a pool of water that is teeming with small doll-like creatures. Blood geysers up with the turbulently swirling waves.
A man is forcibly dragged, screaming, through the broken window of a door. He staggers up, leaving bloody handprints on a wall. A large animatronic mascot then grabs him by the head and lifts him off his feet. The mech slowly crushes his head to a bloody pulp as he screams. A robot leaps onto a vehicle, smashing the roof, windshield and several windows as it tries to reach in and wrench the driver out of her seat.
An animatronic puppet picks up a large knife and approaches a panicked young girl and her mother. “Parents are all the same,” the robot says. “And I have to punish then for that.” Another animatronic killer notes that by morning, “All the parents will be dead.”
Vanessa’s dream visits to her father take on a much more threatening tone than Mike’s dreams in the first film: Her father attacks her. He proclaims angrily that she will always belong to him. Vanessa, in turn, shoots him.
A man is shot and falls off a second-story staircase. People are threatened with guns and knives. A woman gets choked. Someone watches a child get threatened by a large mech on a screen. A man declares that he will carry on the goal of his serial killing father and murder as many people as possible. Robots are ripped apart and crushed.
There are two s-words and one or two uses each of the words “d–n,” “h—,” “a–hole,” “jacka–” and “jeez.” There’s one crude reference to male genitalia.
None.
In the first film, Mike’s protective reactions toward Abby were heightened because of something that happened to Mike and Abby’s other brother, Garrett. Garrett is all but ignored in Freddy’s 2. And to be honest, Mike and Abby’s relationship feels a bit less grounded this go ‘round.
One of Abby’s teachers, Mr. Berg, is inexplicably mean to her. He purposely scratches her name off the science fair project list and refuses to let her participate. And then, when she shows up with a project anyway, he purposely drops and breaks it.
There’s an old adage that suggests that a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time would, with mathematical certainty, type the complete works of Shakespeare. That’s doubtful.
But given a few weeks, that monkey might come up with this movie’s clunky screenplay and its bafflingly illogical choices.
There’s very little expositional connective tissue used to tie the Freddy’s franchise together. And there’s even less explanation for anything that happens in this film. The fact is, if you don’t know every jot and tittle of the first Five Nights at Freddy’s movie and the horror/survival video game franchise it was based on, you’re likely going to be completely lost with this sequel.
Putting any suggestion of simian scripting aside, however, is there anything praiseworthy about this film?
Well, the enlivened animatronics concept is kind of interesting from a creepy movie perspective. The glowing-eyed robo graphics are good. And Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn’t splash its audience with all the death-dealing gore it could have. But that’s all very faint praise, to be sure.
Moviegoers will still have to deal with the murder of children, head-smooshing violence, twisted spiritual possession and a spattering of blood and foul language. This PG-13 franchise may not be quite as gruesome or graphic visually as its R-rated horror brethren, but don’t confuse the lighter rating with a hearty thumbs-up.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
