Five Nights At Freddy’s 2

Less unnerving than pineapple on pizza, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is the dictionary definition of codswallop. The returning creative team, director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Scott Cawthon who created the video-game source material, labour hard to amp up the animatronics-go-apeshit experience but — unlike Paul Dano — this is genuine weak sauce, full of bad writing, poor performances and, for the most part, bereft of scares. If you are hankering for pizzeria-based carnage, best stick with Do The Right Thing.

The first act makes a ham-fisted stab at charting the fallout from the first flick. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying protect his kid sister Abby (Piper Rubio), who is still pining for her animatronic pals Freddy (voiced by Kellen Goff), Chica (Megan Fox), Foxy (also Goff — how is this not Megan Fox?) and Bonnie (Matthew Patrick), who were revealed to be inhabited by the spirits of dead children. Police officer — and Mike’s potential love interest — Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) has taken leave of absence from the force and is processing the idea that the kids were murdered by her serial-killer father William (Matthew Lillard). It might be par for the course for the genre, but, as a franchise, both Freddy films fling heavy ideas surrounding childhood and trauma around very lightly.

Despite the impressive design work, the animatronics are just not menacing.

Surrounding the main characters are the personnel of paranormal-investigation TV show ‘Spectral Scoopers’ (fronted by Mckenna Grace, still ghost-busting but wasted here) who arrive at the site of the original Freddy’s eaterie; Wayne Knight as an over-zealous teacher bullying Abby not to enter her robotic project into a science fair; and, most bizarrely of all, FazFest, a full-on fancy-dress festival that is perversely designed as a remembrance of the carnage portrayed in the first film. Also keep ’em peeled for Skeet Ulrich as a distraught dad, sadly never sharing any scenes with Lillard for a Scream reunion.

Despite the impressive design work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the biggest problem — and it was an issue the first time around — is that the animatronics are just not menacing. They are too slow and lumbering to provide a threat. As a concept, Freddy’s 2 deserves some of the ingenious deaths or malicious glee of, say, Final Destination Bloodlines. Instead, it is toothless and bloodless, over-reliant on sound-induced jump scares rather than anything approaching twisted imagination.

New to the mix are the Marionette, a more effective terror (partly because she doesn’t clomp about) who can invade people’s minds, and, through risible plot malarkey, the idea that the murderous mascots can leave the confines of the restaurant and invade suburbia. This is a potentially fun, Gremlins-y idea, but Tammi and Cawthon never find innovative ways to realise it, the animatronics even less threatening in the real world.

Given the first film’s success ($292 million worldwide), the filmmakers confidently tease the next slice. Fingers crossed it’s better than this load of old (dough)balls.