This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Frankie Freako is a ridiculous movie. The humor is juvenile, the dialogue is silly, and the plotting is more rickety than the minecart that transports its characters across dimensions in a goofy green-screened sequence. The lessons are cliché, the puppetry is crude, and the score is a step above temp-track Muzak. One of the biggest gags involves spray-painting the word “BUTT” on the wall of a suburban house. None of this is a criticism of the latest film by PG: Psycho Goreman director Steven Kostanski. These are all points in its favor.
Kostanski specializes in what can best be described as R-rated kids’ movies, films that play like they were written by a 10-year-old with an affinity for excessive sex, violence, and/or curse words. With the right attitude, the combination of innocent framing and mature content can be quite amusing, although it takes a well-developed sense of mischief to keep the gag fresh for a full 85 minutes. In this respect, Frankie Freako surpasses Psycho Goreman as a movie whose modest ambitions are key to its success.
You’ve got to be smart to pull off stupid, and Frankie Freako cleverly blends little winks at the tedium of the adult world with shameless throwbacks to current grown-ups’ millennial childhoods. The primary influence here is the tiny-terror horror of the Puppet Master and Ghoulies franchises – specifically, Ghoulies Go to College – with a little of the Garbage Pail Kids. Kostanski combines those reference points with a legally distinct take on a 1-900 hotline from the late ’80s that charged callers, presumably kids running up their parents’ credit cards, $2 to listen to messages from a rubbery creature dubbed “Freddie Freaker.”
Kostanski uses this conceit to launch a fantastic plot about interdimensional party dudes who escape to Earth after their leader, President Munch, enslaves their planet and forces the fun-loving Freakos to voice novelty 1-900 numbers. There’s plenty of potential for sci-fi world-building in this concept, but Kostanski doesn’t bother much with all that. (To be fair, this was a low-budget project, and alien worlds are expensive.) Instead, the majority of the film takes place in a living room painted in generic ’90s earth tones, where uptight businessman Conor (Conor Sweeney) has to learn to let loose.
Dark roast coffee is too spicy for Conor, he’s offended by swearing on TV, and his idea of a wild night is watching Antique Connoisseurs and going to bed by 8:30. He has a wife, Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth) who’s way out of his league, as guys in these movies always do. (In one of the film’s most childlike moments, Kristina greets Conor in lacy lingerie when he gets home from work, and then they lay in bed holding hands.) And he’s vying for a big promotion, which guys in these movies are also always doing. But before Conor’s boss Mr. Buelcher (Adam Brooks) can manipulate him into a little white-collar crime, the Freakos pop out of the phone line and into Conor’s life.
Conor is apparently not very self-aware, and is offended when Kristina implies that he might be a little bit of a square. So he takes what is, for him, a big risk and calls the Frankie Freako hotline, and wakes up the next morning to a house that looks like it’s been on the wrong end of a junior high pranking spree. There’s toilet paper hanging from the ceiling, not-quite-lewd graffiti — along with “BUTT,” there’s also “belch” and, funnily enough, “vegetables” — and empty cans of Fart cola (with caffeine!) piled up everywhere.
More menacingly, Frankie (Matthew Kennedy) and his companions, giggling cowgirl Dottie Dunko (Meredith Brooks) and grunting gearhead Boink Bardo (Brooks) have raided Kristina’s gun cabinet (don’t ask) and booby-trapped Conor’s garage, Home Alone-style. The sequence that follows is what gives Frankie Freako its spiritual “R” rating: This variation on Kostanski’s overgrown-kid theme leaves out the self-consciously edgy profanity and concentrates on cartoon mayhem. And it’s lighter and more lively for it, even in those moments where the violence flirts with real peril.
Instead, the emphasis is on the charmingly lo-fi puppetry and practical effects, two specialties of Kostanski and his co-conspirators in the Astron-6 filmmaking collective. Cinematographer Pierce Derks, fresh off of the self-consciously arty slasher In a Violent Nature, toys with soft-focus erotic thriller aesthetics and bright kids’-movie colors alike. Composers Blitz/Berlin similarly play with clichéd sounds, and everyone seems to be having a great time goofing off with their friends on set. But it’s Sweeney – another Astron-6 regular who co-starred in Psycho Goreman – who really ties the film together with his exasperated, Dave Foley-esque performance as the prudish Conor.
You’ve got to be smart to pull off this kind of stupid.
This movie isn’t going to change the world. It has no subtext, and no real message beyond “farts are funny” and “it’s cool to be a party dude.” (Both true.) But if you’re having a bad day, it might cheer you up. And sometimes that’s all a movie needs to do.
