Freak Out (2004)

Posted on Feb 28, 2007 under Comedy, Horror |

Directed by Christian James
Written and produced by Dan Palmer and Christian James
Starring
- James Heathcote
- Dan Palmer
- Nicola Connell
- Yazz Fetto
- Desmond Cullum-Jones

The slasher film may have its legitimate roots in the Italian-made “giallo” suspense films of the ’60s and ’70s, but with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), it started its transformation into a more American subgenre; and when cross-pollination with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) introduced power tools into the formula, the all-American stamp on the genre was complete. Origins be damned, the slasher-massacre film as codified through the ’80s in the Friday the 13th franchise and its imitators may be as essentially American a film genre as the Western or the machine-gun action-adventure.

Which makes me wonder why the two funniest send-ups of the slasher genre that I’ve ever seen come from England. Maybe one has to be just slightly outside the American megaplex to twist it best for comedic effect. Maybe the love-hate relationship which the rest of the Western world has with American pop culture is a necessary precondition to create such spoofs. Whatever the reason, the two best comedies to take their cues from masked mass-murderers are Unmasked Part 25 (1988) and this one. (And don’t ask me to decide which of the two is superior, as it’s been a shamefully long time since I’ve seen the former.)

It’s okay to lust after a bedroom like this. Unless you already have one, in which case I hate you.

Granted, the field of slasher spoofs isn’t that extensive, and a goodly portion of the entries can be summarily dismissed for consideration by their simple failure to be funnier than what they claim to spoof, so you shouldn’t read the above to mean that I think Freak Out to be an immortal comedic masterpiece. It’s awful rough around the edges, and there’s plenty in it that doesn’t work. But the will to entertain covers a multitude of sins, and in the end the surest standard of judgment for comedies is this: I laughed on multiple occasions, and smiled on many more.

Our protagonist is Merv Doody (James Heathcote), a mild-mannered high school student who has wasted the greater part of his short life absorbing the worst that horror cinema has to offer. His bedroom looks like an explosion in a poster factory (and not as discriminating as one might hope — Scream 3? Dude!). His encyclopedic knowledge of slasher flicks scares small children at the video store, and attracts the unbalanced amorous attentions of Abby (Nicola Connell) behind the counter. As is requisite for mild-mannered comedy protagonists (even in Britain, apparently) his best friend Onkey (co-writer/co-producer Dan Palmer) is an obnoxious jerk who works at the bowling alley. He’s in the perfect position for a psycho killer to stumbled into his life. And one does.

Sort of.

The Looney and Onkey and their motivation.

We’ve been graced with a flashback, so we already know the trauma that informs the character known in the credits only as “the Looney”: A vegetarian in his childhood, he was cruelly scorned and pelted with meat by his classmates, until he ran off with this declaration:

I will return in thirteen years to wreak my revenge on this wretched land you mortals know as Redwater Junior School! Ah ha ha haaaa!!

No dogs were injured during the making of this motion picture. (But one was humiliated thusly.)

And thirteen years later, sure enough, the Looney is an escaped mental patient stumbling through the woods in his butt-revealing gown, intent on returning to the scene of his former humiliation…

Which is now a vacant lot.

Yeah, I’d buy one.

It is in this condition — muddy, bedraggled, with a burlap bag covering his features (thus making it possible for at least ten separate individuals to play The Looney) that he stumbles upon Merv’s home, and proves himself something of a disappointment. He’s really a nice individual: Cheerful, enthusiastic, courteously deferential. Once Merv catches him, he takes it upon himself to train the Looney to be what he always wanted: His own personal pet slasher.

Not out of any particular animosity toward the world, though. Merv may be a little socially inept, but he’s not scarred and traumatized and looking for payback on his peers. He just thinks B-movie psycho killers are cool: The getup (eventually they settle on an orange jumpsuit and a classic hockey mask over the burlap sack), the name (gotta have four syllables, apparently), and the style. Together, Merv and Onkey train the pliable Looney, and achieve a semblance of success in everthing except the main event: The killings.

Is there a movie which wouldn’t benefit from the addition of the living dead? My answer would have to be, No.

The story, such as it is, is the butter here, not the bread; and in some spots, it’s spread pretty thin. Which is fine, because an homage to the plots of mid-’80s slasher flicks would be excruciatingly ill-placed. Instead, the focus here is on individual scenes and running gags which disappear and reappear at the oddest junctures. And not everything riffs off slasher cliches, either. Merv suffers through a dullard’s job interview; Onkey attempts to rob a convenience store for no good reason. The Looney has a bizarre fixation on the old TV show Dallas. Both of them sit through a stage-play version of The Blair Witch Project, which might be the funniest version done yet. Yes, the bodies eventually rack up, but it’s very clear that the filmmakers here aren’t the too-common undiscriminating horror fans who simply want to recreate the horror movies they loved when they were fourteen, nor are they professional send-up artist who simply need a genre to riff off. It’s simply a movie that gets its chuckles in the moment, and does it well.