FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Not that there's much to spoil in this nothing horror-comedy: beyond the specific rationale there's very little here that we didn't see in Willy's Wonderland, which was no masterpiece, or the Banana Splits movie, which was no better. Whereas the former at least had Nicolas Cage (but mysteriously it gave him no opportunity to do his signature routine of Bug-Eyed Shouty Freakout), and the latter tried to combine cuddly kid-friendly shenanigans with mean-spirited blood and gore, there's really nothing left for Five Nights At Freddy's to do. Which is exactly what it does.

Based on an apparently huge videogame phenomenon that I'd never heard of until this film's opening credits, Five Nights At Freddy's has schlubby loser Mike (Josh Hutcherson) compelled to accept a job as night security guard at a tacky pizza parlour (abandoned since the 1980s after several children vanished) whose main attraction was a string of animatronic robot animals that sang and danced. Mike is also haunted by the disappearance of his own brother when they were children and uses dream therapies to try and relive the abduction in order to remember a clue, AND is fighting to stop his evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) from seizing custody of his young sister.

So there's a lot of character stuff to fill in - and that's before we get to the attractive cop who spends far too much of her nightshift time at Freddy's and who has a Big Secret. You'd perhaps expect that would make a striking contrast with the splattery gore as the animatronic animals bump people off, but strangely the horror element is half-hearted and very low on the grue (it's a PG-13 in the States and an arguably too-strict 15 here) and there really isn't much in the way of comedy either. But it's far too light and safe, far too devoid of actual nastiness, and so ends up more as a drama with occasional horror elements than an actual horror film (released for the Halloween weekend).

On the other hand, if it is really a kids' film then there's too much backstory about abducted children and psychological trauma: on some level these things are supposed to be fun and Five Nights At Freddy's really isn't. It isn't fun, or scary, or horrific, or very much of anything. There are a few moments where the potential horror is nicely staged but it doesn't deliver because deep down it's really not sure what kind of film it wants to be and what kind of audience it's pitching for. The result is a film that doesn't do very much and doesn't do it very well, leaving you wondering just what the point was. The second star is purely an indication of how charitable I'm feeling right now.

**

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

CONTAIN6 6OME 6POILER6

Another in this year's list of horror sequels that we really didn't need and aren't much good: after Saw X, Scream VI and whatever number the new Evil Dead was, here's an even more inexplicable exhumation of a scenario that absolutely should have been left alone. David Gordon Green's track record with his recent trilogy of Halloween sequels did not inspire confidence, and those low expectations have been barely scraped by this baffling revival of The Exorcist, which pretty much no-one has been crying out for since the last theatrical attempt back in 2005. The notorious Exorcist II: The Heretic is generally reckoned a disaster even though they were trying, possibly unsuccessfully, to do something different with the ideas and characters rather than merely rehashing the previous one; The Exorcist III was wonderfully dark and atmospheric with one perfect and unforgettable jump scare, while of the two parallel fourth instalments Renny Harlin's Beginning was the more multiplex scary and Paul Schrader's Dominion was the more arthouse unsettling. (I haven't seen the stage show or the TV series and I'm not going to.)

The Exorcist: Believer seems to be going out of its way to not be an Exorcist movie to the extent that for the first half hour or more I wasn't sure if the cinema had put the right film on. Two young girls, one of whom comes from a hard Christian family and the other lost her mother in childbirth after a Haitian earthquake, disappear for three days but when they return there's something badly wrong with both of them. Are they possessed? Eventually - eventually! - they call in Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who has experience of this sort of thing...

Aside from several uses of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Chris MacNeil is really the only connection to The Exorcist and if they hadn't dragged her into it this could, and would, have been a regular standalone teen possession movie that would have passed largely unnoticed in the runup to Halloween. Making it part of the Exorcist legacy puts a burden on it that it simply cannot support, even if you're not a massive fan of the original film (and I'm not). Granted, the film accelerates mightily when it finally gets down to some actual exorcising, with an extended all-stops-out bonkers confrontation with much shouting and silly visual effects, but with almost no impact. There are a couple of nice, spooky little something-in-the-background moments early on that do raise a brief frisson, but that's all. And the very last shot, which feels like an end-of-season twist cliffhanger (presumably setting up Deceiver for 2025), just falls stone dead.

The sensible thing to do would be to just abandon the rest of the planned series and just walk away and let it rest now. The Exorcist was never really franchise material anyway; it wasn't something that warranted expansion into a Cinematic Universe. It was a one-off half a century ago that shattered the boundaries of acceptability and shock, and this latest one, which has a 15 certificate, doesn't get anywhere near those boundaries, let alone push at any new ones. The Exorcist: Believer is entirely unnecessary, entirely redundant and entirely not frightening, scary or shocking. This might not be the worst teen possession movie ever made, but it is easily the worst and least interesting Exorcist movie ever made.

*

SAW X

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH, THAT'S GOT TO HURT

Of all the major Hollywood horror series, the Saw saga has always been my favourite. Right from the start we had a central monster educating ne'er-do-wells of the value of human life and humanity rather than another indestructible bogeyman hacking up horny teenagers: if there wasn't a huge amount of profundity there, at least there was a convincing illusion that they were trying to do something a little bit more interesting. Forget Michael and Jason and Freddy. I loved the ingeniously devised torture machines, and I loved that they never shied away from the bloodshed: no quick cutaways, you saw the knife going in and the bones snapping out. (Even after multiple viewings over the years, I still wince at the ankle-smashing in Saw IV). I loved the audacious back-and-forth timeline and constantly flipping narrative structure that actually felt like it was the plan all along rather than a nonsensical retconning to squeeze another movie out, and allowed Tobin Bell's John Kramer/Jigsaw to still feature in most of the sequels, even when they killed him at the end of Saw III and autopsied him at the start of Saw IV. Even making the seventh one in 3D didn't hurt it.

I loved the frantic editing, particularly in every movie's final sequence that showed you everything with the added twists, with Bell's menacing voiceover explaining everything and Charlie Clouser's iconic industrial theme music - as much of a series signature as John Carpenter's 5/4 Halloween theme or Harry Manfredini's shrieky violins for the Friday The 13th series. More importantly, I loved that none of it was sexual. I didn't count while I was rewatching all the previous instalments, but I'm pretty sure that most of Jigsaw's victims (or pupils) were male, and when the women were targeted, it wasn't because they were women. 

Saw X fits in somewhere between Saw and Saw II, when Kramer signs up for a revolutionary new treatment (the one he was explaining at the start of Saw VI) for his cancer, and discovers too late that they've actually done nothing: he's been conned. With surprising speed, he brings in Amanda (Shawnee Smith) and they've soon converted the now-abandoned Mexico lair into a torture factory where retribution, like a poised hawk, comes swooping down upon the wrongdoers and the four grifters inevitably have to hurt, slash and mutilate themselves in order to stay alive. But there are, equally inevitably, plot twists fast approaching...

This is a jigsaw with fewer pieces than usual. Though he still abides by his philosophies of rebirth and redemption through (extreme) suffering, Kramer is more of a vigilante out for justice this time out. It doesn't have the dizzying flips in the timeline (previous movies sometimes leapt to flashback within the same shot) and it doesn't have any big reveals about the characters (except for one which I figured quite early). The first act, showing Kramer's apparent treatment, is almost idyllic but feels way too long, though it's probably necessary, and there's almost a sense that the first trap is only really there because otherwise no blood gets splattered for what feels like the first half of the film. Having said that: when it does finally go for the jugular and teaches these heartless scumbags the lessons they so urgently need and deserve, it genuinely doesn't stint on the crowd-pleasing grue and the screaming and it more than earns its 18 certificate: it almost doesn't know (or care) when and where to stop. (Can you imagine what these films would have looked like back in the James Ferman days?)

Maybe it's my fault for not really wanting them to try and do something more: going for depth and character, going for emotion and seriousness, is fine but I missed the wild, giddy when-are-we timejumps and the oh-it's-that-guy callbacks and the hilariously convoluted structure, I missed so many of the familiar characters. I love that they've retained many of the essential ingredients including the music and editing, and aimed for a consistency of tone, style and technique.

But it still feels like an unnecessary postscript to a series which had already reached its natural endpoint: the first seven movies, whether by accident or design, work as one single entity that never went for comedy (there are no jokes in any of them) and never wimped out. I adore those first seven films but they really should have gone out on a high and stopped there. All horror franchises seem to go on for at least two films more than necessary and sadly Saw has fallen into that same trap. Jigsaw had moments, as did Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (even though it was more a cop procedural with weird standup comedy asides than a Saw film) but they really didn't need to be there. And, sadly, neither does this one. Don't misunderstand: there are absolute bucketloads of disgustingly yukky fun to be had, there's certainly the sense that these people certainly deserve what they get, and there's a satisfying mid-credits coda, but in the end Saw X only feels like half of a Saw film and only scores a V out of X from me.

***