At a long-abandoned funhouse pizzeria called “Freddy Fazbear’s”, the circuitry sparks to life after dark. This place used to have some wacky notions of keeping kids entertained. The current night watchman is there alone to stop anyone breaking in, and must make it through to dawn five times. Unfortunately for him, the featured attractions of the joint – a motley crew of giant, unsettling animatronic mascots with a history of causing carnage – are anything but dormant.

Boasting much the same logline then as now, Five Nights at Freddy’s started out as a point-and-click, survive-the-robots horror game in 2014, which has since spawned a huge cult franchise and eight sequels. A film has been long in development, with sundry false starts: the game’s creator Scott Cawthon, having milked its success already with bulging stacks of spin-off literature, took a hand in each rewrite. 

The script he finally settled on (with director Emma Tammi and modish horror producer Jason Blum) is miles away from satisfactory. The film is forced to lean on atmosphere (ported with monotonous fidelity from the games) and a compellingly worn-out lead performance from Josh Hutcherson. As our incoming security guard, Mike Schmidt, he’s the saving grace.

Mike’s raising his younger sister (Piper Rubio) alone, after the childhood trauma of their brother’s abduction broke their family apart: a hefty chunk of the running time is devoted to reliving this event in Mike’s nightmares. If Stephen King’s 1970 short story Graveyard Shift provides the rough template for all such fare, an IT-like obsession with missing children is thrown in to creep us out, where creeping’s sorely needed. 

Matthew Lillard does his usual toothy mugging as the peculiar career consultant who lumps Mike in this predicament. Otherwise, plum opportunities for black comedy – which Hutcherson’s appealingly zonked performance would have offset perfectly – are never grasped. 

It’s all far too awkwardly plotted to hang together – an entire strand about a battle for custody with Mike’s bitchy aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) goes nowhere, and the cop played by Elizabeth Lail is a cipher with crummy motivation, unless you know the game’s lore inside out. The “five nights” conceit keeps interrupting any suspense, too – even the games have lately retired it – and the longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

Needless to say, we’re a long way off the enjoyment value of Blumhouse’s M3GAN, which used the same toned-down gore to land a PG-13 certificate in America, but at least bounced around with wit and gumption: it was funny, knowing and etched the robot killer with attitude. These specimens, courtesy of the Jim Henson company, are just menacing animal effigies being shunted around. Promisingly malevolent but with little going on inside, they feel like what they are: internet memes being pimped out to the point of exhaustion.

15 cert, 109 min. In cinemas now