‘Frankie Freako’ Review – Throwback Creature Feature Is Pretty Good Pizza

Writer/director Steven Kostanski is doubling down on more of the humor that made Psycho Goreman an outlier for horror comedies within the past few years. This time around it comes in a pint-sized form (give or take a few ounces). Frankie Freako is, largely, a puppet-centric original creature feature that lifts from various Gremlins-adjacent cinematic riffs like a spoiled grade-schooler would when trick-or-treating, regardless of a babysitter’s presence. You could say that Frankie Freako meets expectations and not much more, which would be true.

Kostanski draws from a treasure trove of puppet horror films for inspiration and depending on your knowledge of the sub-genre of ankle-biting creature flicks, it’s either gonna click for you or it isn’t. Simple as that. Goreman’s situational humdrum tongue-in-cheek dad humor is beefed up to the max in Freako.

Unlikely hero Conor finds himself in an existential bind when he realizes that he’s not as cool as he thinks he is and in fact far more boring than he’d originally thought. Wikipedia defines “square” as “slang for a person who is conventional and old-fashioned, similar to a fuddy-duddy.” So a fuddy-duddy he is, at least in the crosshairs of his own diagnosis. Associating himself alongside his equally dry boss — a separately two-dimensional mine of humor in his own self-referential “tired” dad-humor way — Conor fears that monotony will bring a deadly finality to his personality. That is until he sees a commercial promoting a 1-900 number to talk with someone who could fix all his problems: a creature named Frankie who loves to party.

Conor is, as most squares who have jobs are, concerned with performing well enough to get a promotion at the purposefully vague company at which he works. His wife is uncharacteristically artistic and out of Conor’s league on paper: she’s about to travel to finalize a commission for her sculpture work, for which she’s most known in the art world. True to Kostanski’s comedic exploits, her work is inexplicably sitting in the open at their home rather than any kind of studio space. It’s a kind of Chekov’s Gun that you know is being set up, among other things that Conor concerns himself with maintaining picture-perfect cleanliness (as only squares do). This is inevitably the movie’s comedic pattern: setting up and trying to master the cash-in on long-payoff gags.

While the movie’s got you thinking about what each resolution would look like, it starts working on some other stuff over in the basement corner working some short-term cartoony gags that get their own smaller but fun payoffs, almost plum forgetting about the whole thing until it cashes in nearly at the last minute. It’s never late to its own party but it can lean a little bit to one side, like a stack of pizza boxes could if you had enough greasy boys to put together and build the thing.

But that’s not the fault of the pizza, that’s just how it is when you try to build something with it. Surprisingly enough in today’s technologically rich environment, pizza still isn’t a good building material. But if the construct being made with it is at least crude enough to match the quality with which it’s made, we look past its structural shortcomings (aha!) and buy into something beyond the rapidly cooling ingredients dropping well below their food-safe serving temperatures. Kostanski knows this: Ghoulies ain’t no Oscar bait movie, neither is Hobgoblins or Munchies — although I will briefly mention here how my boy Kevin McCarthy was robbed when Ghoulies Go to College got passed for a theatrical release in 1990, leading Driving Miss Daisy to swoop up and take that little bastard Oscar home while the second Ghoulies sequel wouldn’t see the light of day until the next year. Anyway.

If you build a house made of pizza things it’s gotta also do pizza things and be cool like a pizza’s cool. The benefit of this being a movie and not a building made of pizza is that it only has to stay up for about 90 minutes and not a lifetime (‘cause that may not work). Kostanki does a good job with it; his pizza house is pretty cool, has some good flavors, and is pretty much what you’d expect. But you’re the one who called the number, didn’t you? This is what you ordered, and there’s a solid guarantee here that Frankie Freako will deliver. You’re reading this, at least. It’s kind of like how they say that even if the pizza sucks, it’s still pizza and you’ll eat it anyway. But reframe your approach and you’ll probably enjoy the pizza more, grab a beer and put that fancy wine away, or take that obnoxious monocle off before you chow down, Mr. Peanut. The jokes are plentiful and not all will get where they want to go but the physical gags are what this truly seems to be a vehicle for. Steven Kostanski manages to collage together personas from the Puppet Master movies with my favorite of all time, the Ghoulies, a little Critters — and an extremely healthy dose of Howard the Duck thrown in*. But it’s Friday night so why wouldn’t you order pizza? Call 1–900-FREAKO now!

*Don’t you make that face. Howard the Duck is a goddamned delight and I won’t have anyone besmirching its good name.

Frankie Freako will debut exclusively in theaters on October 4, 2024, courtesy of Shout! Studios.