THE BEAR MINIMUM

In theaters this weekend:

Five Nights at Freddy's--The Freddy's in question is Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct and long-shuttered pizza joint and game arcade of the Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper sort. Our down-on-his-luck hero Mike (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a job as a third-shift security guard there. Before long, he finds that the gone-to-seed animatronic animal characters featured in the place may still have some murderous life in them.

This chiller is based on a popular 2014 video game that has given rise to a series of sequel games, novels and other spin-offs. I've never played the games or read the books, so I can't remotely say if the movie is faithful to its source material, or if it should be.

On its own terms, it's okay at best. Like Cocaine Bear from earlier this year, it has a nice '80s throwback flavor in its look, editing and music. Director Emma Tammi manages a few amusingly staged sequences, and Freddy and the other animal characters, products of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, have the repellent horror of deliberate, calculated cuteness gone decrepit. They're legitimate additions to the stable of Universal Monsters.

But the script, by several hands including Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, feels overcomplicated. The premise, right down to the title, would seem to suggest a simple approach: A guy stuck in a bummer job, alone in a creepy setting, finds things getting creepier and creepier and more and more perilous every night, until at last he knows he's not imagining it; the cartoony animal robots really are trying to kill him. Five acts of rising tension.

Instead, Mike is given flashbacks concerning a family tragedy which he's still trying to solve via dream therapy--which means sleeping on the job--as well as a little sister (Piper Rubio) he's trying to keep custody of. This backstory is genuinely poignant and disturbing, to the point that it makes the overt spookhouse horror stuff seem trivial and unfrightening. It's like a Goosebumps movie was mixed with a grim Dateline NBC episode.

The smallish cast is capable; Rubio is a sweet presence as the sister and Matthew Lillard gets some laughs as the guy who offers Mike the job. It should be said that the former child and teen actor Hutcherson (from the Hunger Games flicks and The Kids Are All Right) shows impressive chops in this grown-up lead. He brings Mike an understated but believable aura of lifelong anguish. For me, again, he was too potent for the fun, silly shocker that this should have been.