Of all the things I expected to find myself enjoying in a post-ironic movie landscape half-worshipful of VHS gutters and half-terrified of sincerity, a pint-sized Canadian freakspawn like Frankie Freako was nowhere near the top of my predictions. I’m someone whose tastes, I’ll admit, veer toward the clean lines and careful sounds of other genres entirely—so much so that I’d usually spot a grimy puppet and run screaming for Bergman. But here I am, confessing it outright: Steven Kostanski’s affectionate, anarchic ode to '80s sleazoid creature shams, Frankie Freako, had me grinning, as if I’d found a rubber monster in my lunchbox and decided what the hell, I’d eat it.
Kostanski doesn’t make art from money or pedigree; he makes it from the heap of unsorted pop-cultural marbles rolling around his brain, and in Frankie Freako he’s crafted a love letter to a kind of cinematic excess that looks like what you get when you mix playground glue with Saturday-morning-cartoon mayhem. There is something glorious—almost medicinal—in the gall with which this movie presents its low-budget seams and agitated puppetry, as if to say: Yes, we’re made of felt, spit, and miniature smoke bombs, and we’ll raise hell in your rec room. The plot scarcely matters; it’s a ritual incantation, conjuring up not narrative so much as a snowglobe of pure, deranged nostalgia. Conor Sweeney’s uptight yuppie, a man seemingly allergic to fun, is pitted against his wife and boss in some half-baked test of spontaneity—and what does he find? A party-hotline run by a gremlin in a leisure suit, Frankie Freako, and a night of chaos so shrill you half expect to see Joe Dante and Charles Band sharing directing credit.
Where most of today’s horror-comedies are content to bathe in CGI crust and wink at the audience until their eyelids fall off, Frankie Freako brings back the physical, flaky joy of latex goblins and stop-motion mischief. The monsters here—God bless their rubbery little hearts—are nothing if not proudly handmade, the kind of beasties that seem to have scuttled right out of the deepest corner of the Jim Henson discard pile. To call the practical effects “lackluster” is not an insult but an act of generosity; sometimes they rise (briefly, hilariously) to the level of sub-community-theater, and the puppetry achieves a sort of accidental poetry in its awkward lunges and stumbles. It’s endearing—like watching an elementary school Frankenstein and realizing the seams are the point.
The acting, such as it is, runs the gauntlet from workmanlike to willfully asinine. Conor Sweeney’s yuppie is a portrait in stiff-collared exasperation, while Matthew Kennedy’s Frankie Freako supplies the kind of manic energy last seen in an over-caffeinated morning zoo DJ. Kristy Wordsworth and Adam Brooks play it as if the stakes were no higher than winning a plastic trophy at a PTA fundraiser—which is, of course, exactly correct. The line between “earnest” and “cheap” blurs so thoroughly you’d need a highlighter pen to tell where one ends and the other begins, but this is a universe where the jokes are allowed to fizzle and the actors seem genuinely happy to be playing with their food.
And yet, it’s this ramshackle spirit that wins you over. There’s a giddy, misbehaving innocence to the proceedings—a permission slip for grown-up moviegoers to throw popcorn and howl. When the film barrels into its twist ending, it doesn’t so much outsmart you as give you a friendly goose and run off giggling. You won’t mistake it for cleverness; you might not even remember it in detail. But it works—a sweet, clumsy surprise that makes you remember why you watched this sort of movie in the first place.
Yes, Frankie Freako is riddled with shortcomings. The production values wobble, the script pretends to be cleverer than it is, and the whole is stitched together with a threadbare sincerity. But to bemoan these flaws would be to miss the film’s shaggy-dog raison d’être. This is not a movie to be admired; it’s to be experienced in fits and starts, late at night, surrounded by people who will yell at the screen and cackle at the gags. It belongs to that scuzzy tradition of genre flicks that dare you to laugh with them—and at them.
I suppose this is my way of saying: as a vacation from taste, Frankie Freako is a riot. It reminds you that movies can be cheap, dumb, and full of heart—and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. If you’re willing to meet it on its gummy, plasticine turf, you may, like me, end up surprised by how much raucous, ridiculous fun you have. There’s a peculiar kind of freedom in loving a rubber monster, and this movie—warts, band-aids, bad puns and all—has it in spades.
