Film So Five Nights at Freddy's and The Banana Splits walk into a bar...
"What. The. Fuck?!" Those three words summed up my initial reaction to the news that this was gonna be a thing. Seriously, what demented nutjob thought, "Hey, let's turn an old Hanna-Barbera show into a bloody horror movie, that's sure to be a hit!" So when this aired on Syfy last night, I had to see this shit for myself. Now that I've seen it... it's not as bad as I was expecting.
The plot is rather simplistic. The Banana Splits, a quartet of animatronics, find out that their show is going to be canceled and they're going to be turned into scrap, so they retaliate the only way killer robots know how: killing their human masters. It's basically "The Banana Splits meet Five Nights At Freddy's".
Pros:
- The actors did a pretty good job for the most part, particularly the four main characters.
- The Banana Splits could be legitimately terrifying at times.
- Snorky turning good was actually a pretty good plot twist and one that actually surprised me.
Cons:
- The film is a giant Cliché Storm. It plays every horror movie trope painfully straight to the point that I could practically predict everything that was going to happen.
- The other characters are forgettable at best and annoying at worst. Mitch in particular is a pretty pointless character. Seriously, you could cut him completely out of the film and almost nothing would change. (Snorky doesn't kill him and he doesn't die until the very end, so it would make Snorky's Heel–Face Turn more believable.)
- If the film was trying to make me sympathize with the Splits, it failed. Getting your show canceled and being mistreated is a good reason to go berserk, but forcing a girl to watch her fiancé get dismembered and killing adults to hold their children prisoner forever kinda kills any sympathy I'll feel for you.
Conclusion: It's a dumb, but passable, B-Movie gorefest that offers nothing new to the table save for the premise, and most of what it does has been done better by other films. But if you're morbidly curious like I was or just want to shut your brain off for two hours, have fun.
Film So Stupid It's Amazing
I don't know what the bloody hell the folks at Warner Bros were thinking when they decided to reboot a long-forgotten variety show as a made-for-TV horror movie with a plot that directly rips off Five Nights at Freddy's. I also have no idea what the bloody hell I was thinking when I decided to watch it. While I wouldn't call it a great movie, I couldn't bring myself to despise it either. It's a perfect blend of So Okay, It's Average and So Bad, It's Good that you'd be likely to see from one of the better movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The premise — that the Splits are animatronic puppets that come to life and murder people because their show got cancelled — is absolutely ludicrous, and I think the writers knew that, which is why they don't even pretend to take the concept seriously, and just play it up for all the B-movie camp it's worth. The acting is hit-and-miss; the actors don't have much experience, but I could tell they were trying their best. Characters are developed well enough, but they lacked any semblance of nuance (which, now that I think about it, may have also been deliberate.) Special effects are average, but are noticeably more convincing when the blood starts flowing.
That segues into my favorite aspect of the movie: the death scenes. As someone who grew up watching '80s slasher movies, I can't help but love the scenes where the Splits just go buck-wild and start killing. Sure, they're not up to snuff with Leatherface or Jason or Freddy (Kruger or Fazbear,) but their methods are creative and drawn out just enough to leave an impact (and it helps that most of the characters who die totally had it coming.)
In closing, The Banana Splits Movie is far from an amazing piece of cinema, but it's still guaranteed to put a smile on your face because it knows how ridiculous it is and runs with it.