The
hit videogame series Five Nights at
Freddy’s, that point-and-click survival horror game involving the manager
of a pizzeria trying to survive the night when animatronic animal characters in
the restaurant come to life and turn homicidal during after hours, was bound to
get made into a feature film at some point.
Using
the irony of taking the cute and cuddly childlike imagery of anthropomorphic
mascots and turning them into something terrifying is a novel horror concept,
one which managed to spawn a total of seven official games as well as four
spinoffs. Around the early 2010s, it was
announced Warner Brothers Pictures purchased the film rights to Five Nights at Freddy’s and was
proceeding with making the successful franchise into a film. Circa 2020, we’re still waiting for it to
happen.
In
the meantime, however, it would appear Warner Brothers have taken the unusual
step of making an unofficial quasi-Five
Nights at Freddy’s movie anyway.
Supposedly loosely based on a rejected early draft for Freddy’s, the studio instead turned its
attention on a longstanding popular children’s television show from 1968 known
as The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.
Produced
by Hanna-Barbera (Scooby-Doo; The Flintstones; The Smurfs) and sponsored by Kellogg’s Cereals, the variety
children’s television program prominently featured four animal characters who
played in a fictional rock band, interspersed with animated and live-action
segments with the two disparate mediums occasionally crossing paths.
A
beloved kids’ Saturday Morning Cartoon show which ran from 1968 to 1971, the
idea of taking such an intellectual property aimed at children and, from the
ground up, reimagining the whole thing as a kind of R-rated violent and gory meta-horror
thriller seemed unthinkable. But with
what soon became The Banana Splits Movie,
that’s exactly what they’ve achieved.
On
par with what Sesame Street or Mister Rogers would look like if the
hosts proceeded to brutally murder everyone, The Banana Splits Movie more or less functions as the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie we never
received. As such it represents a
curious detour in black humor by incorporating a real longstanding IP intended
for minors into the tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek horror-comedy now intended
for adults.
Currently
the only official Hanna-Barbera property to receive an R rated treatment, The Banana Splits Movie is an ensemble
thriller involving a live show on the soundstage for The Banana Splits Adventure Hour which goes horribly awry when it
becomes evident the show has been cancelled by a greedy new manager. Upon learning of the program’s demise, The Banana Splits characters rebel and
start murdering the parents, leaving the kids foraging for survival as the
seemingly demonic and possessed animatronic animal characters relentlessly
pursue them.
Satirical, snarky
and often goofy with some ridiculous kills designed to call attention to themselves,
the straight-to-video The Banana Splits
Movie plays somewhat like early Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi or a Troma film
with its offbeat and deliberately contradictory mixture of cute and scary,
funny and horrific. From
the outset, the announcement of this movie raised more eyebrows than ticket
sales with many wondering what the filmmakers were thinking in spinning a real
children’s show into something sinister.
Longtime fans who grew up with the show weren’t keen on this weird
experiment in working a notable IP into a genre it shouldn’t belong in.
For
some this may seem like a stalemate on paper with fans of the show reticent to
the family entertainment turned horror film concept while newcomers may think
they need familiarity with the show to enjoy the film. As a horror fan and newcomer to The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, the
film managed to entertain and breathe new life into the horror comedy subgenre
by offering something fans hadn’t seen or thought of before.
While
we may still one day get an official Five
Nights at Freddy’s movie, I can’t imagine it being half as appealing or fun
as The Banana Splits Movie which is
closer to something like Meet the Feebles
than what you’d find on the Sesame
Workshop. There hasn’t been a horror
comedy quite like this one before, the first of its kind and hopefully far from
the last. Now if they could just get
that R rated Scooby Doo film going…
--Andrew Kotwicki
