[EXPRESSO] Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (2025) | Hind N Seek

Predictably so, we’re back for more FNAF movie escapades, and i’m back to still not knowing (or caring) much about the series, but curious enough to check these films out.

The events of the first film that went down that night at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria became a local legend, leading to a “Fazfest” being held in town.

The protagonist’ little sister, Abby, misses her animatronic friends (more correctly, the children’ souls bound inside them), but things go south as she’s approached by a new menace, the Marionette, and we explore the original Freddy Fazbear establishment, and learn of its sordid secrets.

I didn’t expect much, the first one i thought it was okay, middling but about what you would expect… but in retrospect, that might have been a fluke of sorts.

This sequel is just drivel, lazy slop, just a random mish mash of stuff cobbled together, with no structure, no cinematic structure, more interested in mimicking verbatim stuff that i suppose happens in the games, as this time series’ creator, Scott Cawthon, is the only one credited for the screenplay, and clearly doesn’t care that this is a film and not a videogame, more interested with dated, inane preoccupations of “not being enough like the games” and confusing “lore” for “plot”.

It’s just so lazy, cliched and downright stupid it’s actually insulting, even for a children’s horror film, one clearly aware that it can squeeze any clump of shit and it won’t matter to the box office (or its establishe fanbase)…. so does exactly that.

Even worse than the actors trying but unable to save the movie from itself, it’s how it ultimately amounts to little more than a big set-up and lore dumpage for the third one, more than its own thing.

Can’t wait to be swindled again!

[EXPRESSO] I Play Mother (2024) | Children of The Don’t

So, what’s this, a shitty Goodnight Mommy knockoff but supernatural?

I kinda wish it was, in hindsight, but to be fair the premise is not necessarily bad: a couple that had be waiting to hear from social services receaves the call and they adopt two young kids after their mother killed herself.

The wife, Michelle, goes off to work and the husband, Cyrus, decides to be a stay-at-home dad and try to make the kids feel at home again, to feel safe, to overcome their trauma, despite his efforts seemingly going nowhere initially, and taking its toll on the husband even more as he believes there’s something wrong with them or something from their past coming back….

Fairly standard for a modern horror about parenthood, but the prospective of the father is something a bit different and it being mixed with the “evil kids” trope could make for something quite nice, but in spite of the decent acting and some nice ideas, it is pretty superficial when tackling its own maint themes, using horror cliches as desperate clutches, giving the feel the movie seemingly doesn’t know what to do with itself at times, and yet doesn’t give you any space to doubt if it’s just Cyrus having allucinations.

It wouldn’t even be that bad of a movie, even if a frustrating one that has an idea with some legs but it gets cold feet when it realizes it tried to bit off more than it could chew…until the ending.

That really ticked me off, to put it nicely, a “bad end” just for the sake of it if ever saw one, and one that undermines or undoes all the very predicaments the movie its built on trying to convey, coming off as… stupid, honestly, there because “its a horror movie”.

[EXPRESSO] The Piper (2023) | Devil’s Trill Sonata

It is “evil Hamelin”?

Yes.

And yet people say i can’t do short reviews.

To be honest, this isn’t even that bad of a movie to deserve being summed up “evil Hamelin ghost’s revenge”…. yet it is that, it’s exactly that.

The plot sees a struggling musician strong-handed by her maestro into retrieving a music sheet from her mentor, as she was reluctant to finish the piece, a children’s concerto, even tried to get rid of it before her untimely and gruesome death.

She manages to steal the sheets to get ahead and provide for her semi-deaf daughter, but soon realizes her actions unleashed a sinister presence that starts influencing people, especially children…

It has decent-to-good production values, decent acting, it’s not completely boring, but it’s also utterly predictable, very run-of-the-mill in pretty much every aspect, from the characters, the motivations, even the lore that basically amounts to the usual reworking old folklore legends told to children in a horror context, so we have the entity as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, back for revenge… or something, you get the feeling they don’t show him too much in the movie because they didn’t actually know what to do him until the third act, and boy he does feel like a missed opportunity for a more refined antagonistic phantasm/entity.

Every now and then it has some decent or satisfying moments that avoid it slipping into sub-par slop, it helps that it’s fairly short, 90 minutes with a decent pacing, but for every positive there’s some bullshit that eventually brings it back to being incredibly average and easily forgettable/disposable, despite some effort that – again – doesn’t ultimately pays off in any significant way. The very definition of “nothing special”.

moral of the story: pay people when they do their fuckin job.

[EXPRESSO] Broker (2022) | “Your Baby, Delivered To You, In A Box”

I was miraculously able to watch a preview screening for this one, which competed in this years’ Cannes Film Festival, and is a South-Korean drama directed and written by Hirokazu Kore-eda, better known for Like Father, Like Son, Shoplifters, Maborosi, also director of The Truth/La Veritè, a french film starring a very international cast and his first movie not set (or filmed) in Japan.

Given the director’s well known penchant for family dramas, it’s not surprising his new film it’s about the theme of family, but here touched upon in a more unique way, as it involves a woman who leaves her newborn in a baby box, only to be stolen by child traffickers with a proven scheme.

The mother of the child does come back, tracks down the two traffickers, but instead of ratting them out or worse, she decides to go along on a roadtrip with them so to interview potential new parents for the baby. But eventually this unusual crew is finally tailed by two police officers that are also investigating a murder…

If you’re expecting this to turn into a Hangover style roadtrip movie, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the premise i just wrote, because rest assured that Zach Galiafinakis isn’t gonna show up and play a mentally challenged manchild, as Broker deals with the themes of child abandonment, criminality and family as seriously as you would expect from a movie that touches upon such serious and real situations.

Though, it manages to sport a surprising amount of levity and tender moments, quite needed in this delicate drama about murder, pregnancy, adoptions, etc, because Broker it’s good & depressing. Quite depressing, but not entirely hopeless.

My kind of movie… though Broker felt a bit longer than necessary, for me.

Still, a solid, good drama.