Movie Review of Freak (1999) by Eric R. Lowther

Reviewed by: Eric R. Lowther

Posted by: Root Rot

Freak (1999)

Directed by: Tyler Tharpe

Written by: Linda McCormick and Tyler Tharpe

Hey kids! It’s Eric R. Lowther aka biguglyhairyscary, back on the old Witch’s Hat with my review of 1999’s utter crapfest known as “Freak”, written by Linda McCormick and Tyler Tharpe and directed by Tharpe. Tharpe also plays the title roll in his adult version. Now, please don’t confuse this with the inimitable “Freaks”, directed by Tod Browning in 1932. Where that movie was a groundbreaking piece of exploitation (with a heart) cinema, “Freak” is nothing more than a weak, shoddy homage to John Carpenter’s original “Halloween”. So without further ado, on to the synopsis…

The movie opens on Stacey, a young woman who’s just lost her parents, and her adopted sister, Jodie. After the death of her parents, Stacey decides to sell the family home in Indianapolis and move to Virginia with Jodie so they can make a fresh start. Jodie hates the idea, of course, and her sister for doing it. After our introduction to the sisters, we flash back nine years before to the little town of Valhalla Mills, OH to meet Mavis Keller and her son who we know only as “that Keller boy”. Mavis is the town’s hermit dressmaker and her son is so badly deformed that she’s never had him out in public. By the way, did I mention that Mavis is stark-raving coocoo for Coco Puffs? I didn’t? Well come on, people. You’ve seen slasher movies. Don’t make me do all the work here. Anyway, the boy gets loose from his chains in the attic (I’d make a joke here about originality but that wouldn’t be very original of me) and walks around town for a day. When he gets home, Mavis goes predictably apeshit and locks him away again. That night, Mavis gives birth to another baby, this time a girl, and takes it outside and throws it in the burn barrel to dispose of it. The boy escapes again, rescues the baby and finally kills mama in her bed by bashing her head in with a rock. The police, called earlier in the day when residents saw a boy they’d never seen before going into Mavis’s house, arrive that evening to find Mavis dead and the deformed little boy rocking his newborn sister in the attic. Without even a fuzzy screen to help us transition, we’re sent right back to the sisters in Indianapolis.

Now, first thing’s first. 1) Why did the director open on the present day with the sisters, spend about four minutes with them and THEN flash us back to the killer-in-training only to shoot right back to the sisters in the movie’s present? This may seem like nitpicking, but that’s just freshman moviemaking there. Cutting to a flashback like that after just a few minutes in the present, minutes that had absolutely nothing relative to the flashback, is just a bad directing choice. 2) Mavis was a hermit. We assume she became a hermit because of her obvious mental instability that was more like as not fully realized when she gave birth to the elephant boy. She gives birth on the night of her death. So, who exactly in this little town is fucking the ugly, insane, obese town hermit? Its questions like these that keep me up at night.

Anyway, back in the present we get to feel the tension between the two sisters through their poor acting and even worse dialog as they tool along the back roads of Indiana and into Ohio in Stacey’s orange VW bug. They eventually come to a truce in a Cosby Show sort of way, a truce that’s almost broken when Stacey discovers that Jodie has smuggled a ferret on board. The ferret was a going away present from one of Jody’s school friends before leaving Indianapolis, so you just know the little fucking rodent is going to be pivotal somewhere along the line. We cut back and forth from the sisters to Jason, an orderly working at an insane Asylum outside Cincinnati, OH. Jason is a parolee who got his job through that same program and appears to be a decent kind of guy. Jason is tasked with transporting the now adult-sized Keller to another facility in Ohio. We get a long, taped monolog from Keller’s psychiatrist recorded for Jason’s benefit that gives us the back story that we already had to sit through in the flashback. We also learn that Keller hasn’t said a word to anyone since he arrived there 9 years ago, barely moves unless made to and has replaced the mask his mother had made for him to wear with rolled gauze. We’re told the doctor allowed this because the gauze was lighter than and not as hot to wear as the masks. You and I know, however, that the movie’s showing its “Halloween” rip-off colors already, and the style of mask we see in the flashback would’ve made this slasher such an obvious rip-off at first blush that they wouldn’t even have been able to use pics of it on the DVD box (more on that particular piece of bullshit later). Keller gets loaded into a van for transport, but the orderlies loading him forgot the lock used to secure the inmate’s chains. Since Keller has no violent history since he became a ward of the state and doesn’t really move, they say, “aw, fuck it” and just put him in the van. Jason, our parolee, hops in the van with a police-band radio to keep in contact with the asylum, a hidden pistol and a 6 ft 3, deformed maniac wrapped in gauze.

As the movie goes on, we get more uninteresting banter between our sisters and more uninteresting time spent with Jason as he drives Miss Crazy to his new home. Jason arrives way too early to deliver his passenger, though, so he decides to stop off in New Town, OH, for a bite to eat and to waste some time. While he’s in the diner, the Keller boy seems to notice his surroundings for the first time, recognizes them as familiar and suddenly develops the mojo to escape. Jason comes out later, discovers Keller missing and tries to phone the asylum to tell them what’s happened. He realizes while on the phone that he can’t do that or even call the police, though, for fear that they’ll revoke his parole. Jason sets out looking for Keller, using the police radio he just happens to have as a guide for reports of any suspicious persons in the area.

Okay, I hate to be a dick here but… come on, now, Tharpe. The van is obviously set up for transporting dangerous individuals. It’s virtually windowless, has only two narrow benches running down either side and has bullrings in the floor for chains. 1) The locks would already be in the van, with their keys on the same key ring as the van’s ignition. 2) The van has a steel cage separating cargo from driver’s compartment and the van doors wouldn’t be set to open from the inside, only the outside just as with a police cruiser. We find out a little later that New Town, OH is a good 30 or so miles away from Keller’s Valhalla Mills hometown, and Keller hasn’t been out of the asylum since he was nine. He was also kept locked in an attic and such a secret that the entire town didn’t even know he existed until he killed his mother. So, Mr. Tharpe… how the fuck would Keller know where New Town was in relation to Valhalla Mills? He was NINE FUCKING YEARS OLD. Most nine year olds have a hard time telling you how to get to a Wal Mart in a neighboring town, even one they’d been to several times. Oh, yeah, and the two-way, police band radio. We see Jason trying to call the asylum on the payphone, and even when he’s obviously late in delivering his prisoner, the asylum never tries to raise him on the radio. So… WHY THE FUCK, other than it’s pivotal later, DOES HE HAVE A TWO-WAY POLICE BAND RADIO if it can’t be used to communicate with the asylum in the first place? At this point the director’s just bending us over and forcing us to accept this crap. Okay, deep breath…

Keller escaped the diner by hiding in the bed of a pick-up truck. The truck’s owner is the proprietor of the town’s body shop. He and his girlfriend drive home, allowing Keller access to his shop to get some clothes to replace his hospital scrubs. The shop owner catches him breaking in and calls the police before grabbing a shotgun, jumping into the truck with his girlfriend and going out to look for Keller. They do find him, but Keller is able to kill them both. Finally, the sisters pop back up. They pass by Keller just after he loads the bodies into the bed of the truck, allowing Keller to see Jodie as they drive past. Something snaps inside him and he thinks Jodie is his long lost sister, so he follows them. Eventually, he rams their car with the pick-up truck. The sisters stop and call the police, but of course while Stacey is on the phone with the cops the damn ferret gets lose, Jodie gets separated and Keller kidnaps her. Jason catches the call on the police radio, meets up with Stacey, and with very little explanation she just jumps in his van. Jason knows Keller is going back to Valhalla Mills. He just knows it, so the two go chasing off after Keller.

Look, people… I don’t know how much more of this I can take. *sigh* Keller was institutionalized at nine years of age. He was locked in an attic the whole of his life before that. WHERE THE FUCK DID HE LEARN TO DRIVE A LARGE PICK-UP TRUCK AND PERFORM HIGH-SPEED MANUEVERS? The whole movie is just jam packed with this utter nonsense bullshit, and I now realize that I’ve hit my limit. The rest of the movie is a predictable, steaming pile that ends just like you think it will. Don’t let me stop you from experiencing this floater for yourselves, if you have the masochistic balls for it. Just don’t come crying to me afterwards. You’ve been warned.

Also, I feel the need to mention the short film, “Headcheese”, added in the extra features. If this thing were any more boring, disjointed and completely inane it would be used during terrorist interrogations. This is something that even an 8 year old Tarantino would’ve pissed on. It does have a few interesting images, but that’s it. It’s supposed to have something to do with a demon hunter in the wilds of Texas, but really I think it’s just the filmmaker’s cry for help.

Now for the nuts and bolts, or should I say duct tape and safety pins? The direction is plodding, unimaginative and gives us absolutely nothing we haven’t seen before in a hundred other sub-par genre films. The effects, for what little need we have for them here, are discount store, day-after-Halloween quality and the script has less life in it than Ed Geine’s mama. The acting is on par with that same sub-par quality genre fare as well.

I’m not even going to bother with the “is it any good”. It’s not. Really. It’s just not. Even though there’s nothing good to recommend this thing, though, the DVD cover certainly thinks there is. Somebody owed somebody a favor or somebody was giving a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of blowjobs for the front cover blurbs. Rue Morgue called this thing, “Astounding…genuinely harrowing”. Film Threat called it “Gruesome and disturbing”, and a few others thought this piece of garbage was just the bee’s knees. This proves one thing and one thing only; stick with the Witch’s Hat for your movie reviews. Now, flip the box over and we find out that many of the locations used for the “Headcheese” short are the same locations used in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So, Tharpe; it wasn’t enough that you took a big, splatty, runny shit all over “Halloween”, was it? Just to make sure your horror sacrilege was complete you had to defile Chainsaw, too? My God, man… how do you sleep at night?

Well, that’s all I can take of this happy horse shit for one review. Make sure you’re checking out all the other good stuff on the blog, and that you’re keeping up with all the podcast goodness going on ‘round here. So, until next time this has been biguglyhairyscary saying, see ya, kids.

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