Freaked (1992)

October Challenge – Day 9

Tonight’s movie is the absolutely ridiculous “Freaked” from 1992. Ever wondered what Alex Winter did after Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey? Well, the answer is this bizarre piece of horror comedy. The movie has an all star cast including Keanue Reeves, William Sadler, Randy Quad, Megan Ward, Brooke Shields, Bobcat Goldthwait and Mr. T. This is also Alex Winter’s directorial debut, teaming up with fellow “Idiot Box” alumni Tom Stern.

This film has a freaky history. It sort of originated from “The Idiot Box”, a shorted lived sketch show on MTV staring Winter and was originally supposed to be a low budget horror staring the members of the band “The Butthole Surfers”. Somehow the film ended up being produced as a feature movie by 20th Century Fox, without the Butthole Surfers and with Winter and co-writer Stern directing (Despite neither of them having any directing experience) Fox. The studio invested $12m (Equivalent of $25m today), had a novelisation ordered, a comic book and even made action figures. Unfortunately for them though the test screenings were so bad Fox pulled it from theatres, killing it’s box office and essentially relegating it to a direct to video release.

Freak Land

Our story starts out with a framing device of the lead character, “Ricky Coogin” (Winter) being interviewed, where he tells his story. Ricky is an actor and an “American Sweetheart”, but a bit of a douche in real life. He takes an endorsement deal from a shady corporation to promote a toxic fertilizer in South America. It’s pretty clear this is a bad thing, but he doesn’t want to say no to the $5m he is offered to do it. He and his friend “Ernie” (Michael Stoyanov) fly to South America where they meet environmental activist “Julie “(Megan Ward) who they offer to give a ride to (So she can get to a protest). On the way they opt to go to see a Freak Show and this is where the story really starts.

The show is run by “Elijah C. Skuggs” who has been using this toxic fertilizer to transform people into various freaks. He captures the group and transforms them with Julie and Ernie merged together into one two headed freak and Ricky turned into an especially grotesque half freak (with the other half apparently to come when Skuggs’ get’s more of the chemical). They are then taken to where the other freaks are held captive and like the other captives forced to perform at shows. Eventually Ricky learns to like and respect the other freaks and teams up with them to escape and defeat Skuggs and the evil corporation that hired him in the first place, who were in on Skuggs’ evil deeds all along.

Freak Out

I skipped over a lot there, but none of it is really that important. The plot is fairly generic, with what makes the film unique being it’s general weirdness and of course that is never more present than in the specifics of each freak. You have a human worm, you have a wolf man (Keanue Reeves), you have a cow man (also dressed as a cowboy), you have a French diver… I mean literally just seems to be a French man in a diving suit, a man that farts fire, a human toad, eyeballs with machine guns (used as guards), Mr. T as a bearded lady (Yes, you read that right) and my personal favourite a human sock puppet, who it turns out (minor spoiler) is actually a man whose head was turned into hand, which he then wears a sock on. He is played by Bobcat Goldthwait and honestly, no one else could play him. This is the movies strength, just the absolute absurdity of it.

The film is absolute B-Movie material, but with frankly unnecessary polish. It is absolutely ludicrous and just gets sillier as it goes on. The problem is it’s only really funny on occasion and usually the humour comes from the absurdity, meaning it wears thing quickly, while the rest of the story brings little to the table and the characters have little to them outside their freak gimmick. As for the effects, well, it would be generous to describe them as cartoon like. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve effectively seen the film or at least the bits worth seeing.

Freak In

I can’t help but feel this movie actually suffered from being raised to a feature with a higher production budget. On screen the only way it really benefited was in improving the cast, but these are not roles that needed top actors and given Keanu’s relationship with Alex he would have probably done his small role anyway (Remember this is way before The Matrix moved him up to A-List status) and the other names could have been swapped out for no name actors with little problem.

Ironically a couple of years after this came out MTV started making it’s own movies and with Winter and Stern having ties with MTV I have no doubt they could have made it with them closer to their original vision (Which would have had a darker tone with more graphic violence). But alas, that didn’t happen and instead it pretty much killed off Winter’s career. Probably lucky for Keanu that his role was uncredited, indeed if not for the IMDB I wouldn’t have known it was him.

Freak Off

This is a tricky one to rate. It’s not good, but as someone that occasionally enjoys bad movies I can’t say I hated it either. It is wonderfully bizarre, it just didn’t quite work for me. Your mileage may vary with this and I can absolutely see some people getting a real kick of the movie and others saying it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen. Anyway for me it is a 4.5/10 and falls into the category of “curiosity viewing”.