Freddy’s Fridays (2023)

With great success of a blockbuster, there’s always bound to be a mockbuster that comes up from the rear to pull from the momentum. What with the shocking success of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” we have the UK mockbuster known unsubtly as “Freddy’s Fridays.” From director Ben J. Williams (who gave us “Supernado,” and “Spiders on a Plane”) comes a pretty dull horror movie that is a hefty mixture of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Hellraiser.” It’s a paper thin premise that probably took a paragraph to expound on on paper, and amounts to a barely eighty minute movie that works hard to stretch the run time with a ton of filler.

After a string of disappearances in the escort circuit, Detective Lila Jones begins to investigate learning that the crimes are connected to a demonic book that brings a group of murderous dolls to life. As the body count begins to rise, Lila and her two best friends soon learns the curse of the demonic Freddy’s Fridays, and an impending holy war, and must find a way to stop it before any others disappear.

“Freddy’s Fridays” has obviously so little narrative to it that it feels like director Williams looked for ways to stretch the script as far as he could. It shows in offering us long drawn out moments of exposition and melodrama, while never focusing on the characters. There’s also not a lot of reasoning for these characters to be interacting with Detective Jones for the most part. So much of the film is basically a murder mystery with a supernatural bent, and once we get down to the meat and potatoes of the lore behind these demons, it’s all fairly lackluster. If these demons are all powerful why do they require the book holder to bring them eight souls? Why does Frederique only operate on a small window on Fridays?

If Frederique is the demon of the book then what are the monsters that appears with him? Are they his sidekicks? Are they manifestations of him? Are they his foot soldiers a la the Cenobites? Also what happens to the holder of the book once Frederique has taken all of the souls? If the don’t fulfill their end of the bargain are the sacrifices revived somehow? In either case, nothing is ever fleshed out competently enough to warrant any interest. The whole catch is the feature a group of what look like left over props from other productions that engage in gory murders. They literally do look like left overs, as the group of demons have no connecting themes or threads to them.

They also only appear three times during the film for a total of four minutes give or take. So anyone expecting these monsters to go on full rampages like a full fledged slasher movie, they’re in for a huge letdown.

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