From its ridiculous opening scene, there is little denying that “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is one of the stupidest movies of 2025. Its only real competition comes from Disney’s live-action “Snow White” remake thinking that its Dwarfs were fit for human eyesight. And it’s not even the fun kind of stupid horror movie. It was never really on the table for this to be a “good” horror movie like “Sinners,” but it could have at least been an interesting flavor of stupid. The potential for such flavor is at least present in the opening scene, but the movie squanders even that prospect fairly quickly.

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In the opening scene, set in 1982, morose young Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie) eschews every other entertaining aspect of children’s pizza emporium Freddy Fazbear’s to wait for her favorite animatronic character. She turns her attention long enough to notice a boy being abducted (as would later become common at Freddy’s) and tries to alert parents at nearby tables, but none will listen to her. If her warnings had caused a deadly panic, then maybe that could have been a plausible foundation for a horror movie, but no, the movie seriously has all the adults just blow off a girl who is screaming about witnessing a child abduction. She has no choice but to try to rescue the boy herself, which costs her her life. She dies onstage as her aforementioned favorite animatronic – the Marionette – a character not in the first movie because it did not carry over to the subsequent Freddy’s franchise location where that movie was set, appears to take her soul.

In the present day, first-movie protagonist Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to move on with his life. He’s got a good thing going, now with uncontested custody of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and a budding relationship with cop friend Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). But Vanessa is still haunted by dreams of her villainous father William (Matthew Lillard, only used for a cameo for the sake of a cameo) and Abby is being bullied by her loathsome science teacher (Wayne Knight). Plus Abby just has to be obsessed with her old “friends” at Freddy’s, which leads to Mike giving her a radio that lets her talk to the possessed robots. It turns out that the radio lets her talk to the “wrong” possessed robots, as in the ones at the old Freddy’s location, which includes The Marionette, now possessed by Charlotte.

Charlotte, who can possess the Marionette animatronic, but also humans, including a viral ghost chaser (McKenna Grace, actually quite scary on the few occasions that the movie lets her be) is on a mission to rid the world of adults. Not just the adults that ignored her in 1982 – all adults. Some manipulation of Abby and boom, Charlotte now has a whole fleet of Freddy’s robots at her disposal. Characters jockey for control of the robots, who are descending on a town-wide celebration of the Freddy’s legacy. The movie looks like it’s ready for a big festival showdown around crowds of people for its climax and then… it ends.

Is it an unwelcome spoiler to say that the movie ends with only one robot at the festival and more on the way? Maybe so, but it was an unwelcome spoiling of my moviegoing experience for the movie to end where it did. And the sequel-bait ending is only one of the movie’s problems. The pacing is horrendous, the acting is stiff, cheap jump scares are way overused, the robots can supposedly sneak up on people despite being giant metal monstrosities, we’re expected to keep track of which robots are under whose control despite there being multiple versions of the same robots, and Matthew Lillard doesn’t share any screentime with fellow “Scream” killer Skeet Ulrich (as Charlotte’s father) despite the movie’s advertising heavily implying a reunion. With very little time left to lose its lead, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is the worst movie of 2025.

Grade: D

“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is rated PG-13 for violent content, terror and some language. Its running time is 104 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.