Hey, you guys remember that part of the the 80s when there seemed to be a disproportionate number of movies featuring lil’ rubber monsters running around wreaking all sorts of tongue in cheek havoc? Well, Steven Kostanski certainly freakin’ does as that seems to be the entire basis of his latest throwback epic, Frankie Freako, which once again aims to beat you mercilessly about the head and neck with trashy nostalgia and offer up a movie that will make literally no sense to anyone born north of the year 2000.
Obviously the smart money is to make the assumption that Kostanski (and a cluster of friends from the formally defunct Canadian filmmaking collective known as Astron-6) is using Gremlins as his touchstone, but once Frankie Freako gets going, it becomes obvious that the filmmakers has set his sights a whole lot lower and is gleefully homaging the ever more threadbare rip offs that appeared in the wake of Joe Dante’s Christmas classic.
But is making a movie that requires an unironic familiarity with the like of Ghoulies Go To College to make the jokes fully work actually a good idea? If anyone can do it, it’s going to be Kostanski.
Office worker Conor is bland. Like, bread and water bland. In fact, you might go as far to say that he’s a square, but the worst thing about it is that Conor is hideously unaware of this fact. His slimy, ponytailed boss can’t stand him and is actively trying to frame him for a spot of company embezzlement that he needs someone to take the fall for and his wife is steadily losing patience with the fact that the mist hot and heavy her spouse wants to go is to merely hold hands. However, after he spies a commercial advertising for a late night party hotline named Frankie Freako, he finds himself bizarrely drawn to ringing it and after his wife goes away for the weekend, Conor gives into temptation and rings it.
Much to Conor’s horror, the hotline turns out to be a gateway from the distant planet of Freako and before you know it he’s beamed three of these freaks into his living room who immediately turn his life (and his house) utterly upside-down with their furious partying. Led by the purple haired, shades wearing party dude, Frankie Freako and flanked by his buddies, techno-nerd Boink and gun twirling cowgirl, Dottie, the Freaks attempt to remove the stick from Conor’s butt via a destructive war of attrition, but after the wild little gobins manage to wear him down, the panic stricken square realises there’s something much bigger going on than a bunch of rubbery aliens trashing his home and guzzling endless cans of Fart Beer (contains caffeine). Before you know it, Conor finds himself in the middle of an intergalactic beef between Frankie and the malevolent leader of Planet Freako, President Munch. Can Conor manage to get back to earth, fix his home, not be so uptight and solve an alien conflict before his wife gets home? Fasten your freak belts, folks.
Since his Astron-6 days, Steven Kostanski has essentially cornered the market on movies that extensively riff on absurd 80s fads such as the magnificent perversion of kids animated shows, Psycho Goreman and an upcoming Deathstalker reboot that no one has asked for and yet I can’t wait to see it. The main target this time is the bafflingly prevalent 80s subgenre of little rubber monster movies that sprung from the success of Gremlins and frequently saw diminutive feral creatures descend upon a sleepy American town somewhere and engage in all sorts of badly puppeteered shenanigans. However, the real joke is that Kostanski isn’t interested in trying to invoke the state of the art likes of Gremlins, or even the likes of fairly polished also-rans such as the Critters franchise or even the first Troll. No, the gag is that the film is amusingly trying emulate the more low rent end of the spectrum by referencing trash like Ghoulies, Muchies, Hobgoblins and some of the more creatively devoid Puppet Master sequels. In fact, that crack I made about Ghoulies Go To College at the top of the review is actually the best advise I can give, because surely anyone not familiar with John Carl Buechler’s scappy, slapstick puppet show might struggle to get the joke; in fact, to show its reverence, one of the characters is even named for the special effects workhorse turned director who spent more time than most creating little slimy hand puppets for whacky horror comedies.
As a result, everything about Frankie Freako is deliberately shit as so to accurately recreate the experience of a dime store, little monster movie. The performances are highly camp, the puppets barely have any articulation and the plot is willfully nonexistent, but then anyone who is also familiar with the past work of Astron-6 would also already be savvy to their efforts.
However, while it is so much of a joy to see so much of the gang back together again, Frankie Freako is ultimately more Manborg than Father’s Day and as I stated before, Psycho Goreman is a far more superior effort when it comes to weaponising all the weird, fucked up shit that kids in the 80s sat down and watched.
Also laced throughout is a bunch of killer one liners that, again, might fly way over the heads of anyone under thirty, but will spark up fond memories of random stuff like hotlines – the reference to the Freddy Krueger one is fucking sublime (“He was so mean to me…”) – and weird alien characters who are inexplicable party animals and fire off nonsensical catchphrases at the drop of a hat (Boink’s utterances of “Shabba-Doo” has a great payoff due to a brutal beating that has him weakly pleading “Shabba-don’t”). Also, what with this being an Astron-6 thing, there’s a real sense that the film, while utterly irreverent to its very core, is really overachieving as a shift to Freako World in the final act gives us a bizarre stop motion world that has gangster robots as guards, a Temple Of Doom minecart chase and a weird quirk that President Munch thinks that Conor is a hot piece of ass.
Not all the jokes land, but then I’m probably betting that Kostanski thinks it’s even funnier when they don’t. I’m still not sure why Dottie is a cowgirl, the denouement just doesn’t work and I was expecting a much better payoff for Adam Brooks’ scuzzy boss and I have to reiterate that if you didn’t grow up with these movie YOU WON’T GET THE JOKE. However, I’d walk over hot coals in order to get to any more Astron-6 projects and while I would have preferred a Psycho Goreman sequel over this, it still manages to nicely scratch the throwback itch that the gang had always excelled at.
Often funny, frequently baffling and always unpredictable, I have unnaturally high hopes that Kostanski’s Deathstalker redux will do the same for fucked up 80s fantasy flicks, but until then, Frankie Freako is a nicely acceptable change to watch the filmmaker get his freak on.
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