FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

Creepy animatronic critters and troubled families link three graphic tales adapted from print tie-ins to a series of video games in this third series entry.

Furnished with slender storylines, the trio of stories—two featuring evil bunnies and the third, a maimed animatronic pirate fox who accurately predicts gruesome injuries for a hapless teen gamer—follow the contents of earlier volumes in reducing prose tales to sparely narrated graphic remakes that alternate bland scenarios with lurid dream sequences and climaxes. For all the supposed bloodshed, the gory bits, rendered as minor dribbles and smears, barely register visually even though one character is dismembered at the end by doctors who are harvesting his organs and another winds up impaled on some jagged stage scenery. Those two entries bookend a more benign story, “Bunny Call,” in which a restive dad rediscovers family values after spending a night protecting his kids from a summer camp prank that starts out merely tasteless—and then goes really wrong. The cast reads white with minor exceptions. Some cast members—human or otherwise—will be familiar to players of the titular game series. The straightforward art panels feature clean backgrounds and are rendered in muted, atmospheric shades.

Low-budget thrills for the Goosebumps set.