Mockbusters is a genre I’ve written extensively about, and it continues to intrigue me. In short, mockubsters are flicks created to capitalize on the popularity of real films. They make money if enough people are fooled into renting them on VOD thinking it’s the real film. In the 90s, you could always find one of them on VHS in every home of a child that had grandparents who didn’t know the difference between a Disney’s Aladdin and some cheap knockoff.
It doesn’t take much to make a profit since these films are always made on the cheap and are mostly produced by a few studios, with a handful of directors and screenwriters being responsible for most of them. The director and writers of this film were all involved in the dreadful shit that was Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)
Here we have Freddy’s Friday, a mockbuster of the film Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) which is based on a video game series unplayed by me, but I did see the film. It was fine and it starred two actors I genuinely like, Matthew Lillard and Josh Hutcherson. I don’t know any of the actors in Freddy’s Friday, although I have probably seen them in other mockbusters.
Unlike Five Night’s at Freddy’s, Freddy’s Friday mostly takes place in daylight (cheaper to shoot) following around a female detective or in her apartment. She has some personal issues described in long dialogue scenes that I didn’t care about, but she does stumble upon a mystery. A dude is bringing people down to a basement where mascots are waiting to kill them. There is a curse of some kind where he needs to bring them people to kill.
The mascots aren’t animatronic, but people in costumes. One is a rabbit with a twitching eye, another is a Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) Halloween costume and some kind of scarecrow man. There is blood but most of it is bad CGI.
That’s in line with everything else in the film. The acting is bad, the script is bad, etc., but that goes without saying. The only good thing about it is the fact it’s only 75 minutes long. To make up for the laughable running time, it has the slowest scroll of end credits that I’ve ever seen. Especially since there were like 20 people involved in the 2 day shooting and 1 day post-production it took to make it.
With this review, it has a critic’s review on Rotten Tomatoes, and I fear that I’ve legitimized it by writing it.
