“Fasten your freakbelts”
Directed by Steven Kostanski (The Void, Psycho Goreman), we start the festival with a film whose tone and mayhem is deeply rooted in the puppet creature features of the 80’s and 90’s. Frankie Freako is a Canadian horror comedy with a considerable about of heart within it’s riotous and chaotic set pieces.
Firmly setting up camp in a time of neon, chunky cars, and telephone hotlines we have Conor (Conor Sweeney) as a office yuppie with a somewhat regimented, vanilla, and “square” life. He is married to Kristina (Kristy Woodsworth) who, whilst in love, yearns for a bit more excitement and unpredictability from her husband. After seeing a bunch of advertisements for a party hotline involving the titular Frankie Freako and his buddies, Conor decides to call it when Kristina is away one weekend for work and then his life gets quite bonkers.
Firstly, this film knows the films it takes inspiration from. It is a given that this will be compared to Gremlins, Ghoulies, and the Puppetmaster films but what you do not consider when going in is the numerous references to Robocop, Terminator, and some points other stuff like Bill & Ted and (maybe) Zardoz. It is, in the best way, incredibly cartoonish. Conor’s excessive dullness, enjoyment of terrible TV (an antique show where nothing is worth anything), and mumbling glee at calling someone a “bonehead” is perhaps over the top, but it’s a wonderful lens for a film with a 90’s setting, that doesn’t actually doesn’t feel derivative of the time. The film starts wacky and then goes into full throttle (like the initial pops of corn building before the bag explodes) and jumps to places literally out of this world.
Then reality becomes even more exaggerated and the campiness goes up a notch, but there are nice emotional moments too where things slow down and effectively anchors the message of the film. This sets it apart from some 80’s and 90’s pastiches that try to cram joke after joke in to much less success. It is not so much a scary or gory film, but it is funny. Think Home Alone meets Looney Toons by way of Gremlins.
We are a big fan of puppetry, and (as an audience member pointed out in the Q+A), Frankie’s puppet was somewhat reminiscent of “Boglins”, those old creature toys I had growing up. Several of the others gave me flashbacks to Henson’s work, e.g. the smaller looking robot puppets reminded of those Doozer construction workers from Fraggle Rock (don’t ask, maybe a scale thing). It is not just the puppets that bring the feeling of “home-made but big budget” however. There are parts of the film in “Freak World”, a planet full of Freako-like characters which is being oppressively ruled over, and these look stunning both in the kinetic cityscape moments and the still shots. The film is incredibly slapstick, there are numerous practical set-pieces involving glue, projectiles, tripwires and things either exploding or crumbling before the viewer’s eyes. Everything is beautiful, the puppets get a lot to do and the house at it’s peak is truly insane as a graffiti-covered nightmare of a hangover. The amount of stuff that happens to it, it is practically it’s own character.
The cast are all good, Conor Sweeney (Conor) is an endearing and funny lead, Kristy Wordsworth (Kristina) effectively leans into the aesthetic, and Adam Brooks (Mr. Buelcher) for some reason reminds of a more amoral (but still likeable) bad guy version of Rip Torn’s, Chief Zed. The main three puppets: Frankie Freako (Matthew Kennedy), Meredith Sweeney (Dottie Dunko), and Boinka Bardo (Adam Brooks) are all excellent too and contribute to the atmosphere of fun, mischief and destructive gags that are the crux of the action. An added surprise for many crossover fans is that many of the Red Letter Media guys (Mike Stoklasa, Rich Evans, and Jay Bauman) all have various roles in this too. Rich Evans plays the villain, President Munch, but in fairness he has a voice made for something like this, with his day-to-day infectious laugh.
“Frankie Freako” is an incredibly charming, small-creature horror which serves as a worthy entry in it’s particular horror category. Personally, we feel it is up there and prefer it to any number of Ghoulies films out there. It is not merely paying homage, the message of letting loose and having fun is sincere and hard to resist. If you already love these kind of films, Frankie Freako is unmissable; if you are not sure, it is worth the gamble.
If you are still interested, then check out the trailer below: