By Nicole Veneto 

Filled with B-movie puppet antics, Frankie Freako is a joyous throwback to the days where you could walk into a video store and rent one of a dozen Gremlins rip-offs about someone’s mundane suburban life being upended by a bunch of little guys.

Frankie Freako, written and directed by Steven Kostanski. Available on VOD

The party king Frankie Freako is here to freak up your life. Photo: Shout! Studios

If you were channel surfing in or around 1988, there’s a small chance you caught a rather peculiar commercial. The 30-second ad begins with some spinning text reading “THE FREAK PHONE” and then abruptly cuts to a grotesque T-posing “party freak” by the name of Freddie Freaker. A jingle urges you to call “1-900-490-FREAK” as the stiff yellow puppet bounces in place as if he’s suffering from acute arthritis. In truth, this did not air on Adult Swim at four in the morning, though it has the same uncanny look and feel of a gag from Too Many Cooks or one of David Liebe Hart’s singing ventriloquist dummies. Not much was known about Freddie Freaker for the longest time — it just existed, inexplicably, in a way that made it ripe for internet virality decades later. After rising from the ether of Tumblr in the early 2010s, Freddie was granted a second gust of popularity via the YouTube channel OneyPlays in 2017. This sparked a limited edition line of plushies that sing the “1-900-490-FREAK” earworm I’ve annoyed everyone in hearing distance with for the last week.

So where did this strange goblin creature come from? Was he summoned? Does he represent a force of pure evil or of godly benevolence? What the hell is “THE FREAK PHONE”? Freddie Freaker turned out to be advertising a novelty telephone line from L.A. Toys — you could call to hear someone tell you corny jokes in a funny voice. (This was the pre-internet era after all.) Whether Steven Kotanski somehow remembered the Freddie Freaker commercial from childhood or stumbled upon it as a meme I can’t tell you, but I am thoroughly convinced Freddie was the inspiration for Kostanski’s new creature feature Frankie Freako. Overflowing with B-movie puppet antics, Frankie is a joyous throwback to the days where you could walk into a video store and rent one of a dozen Gremlins rip-offs about someone’s mundane suburban life being upended by a bunch of little guys.

That mundane suburban life belongs to office yuppie Connor (frequent Kotanski collaborator Connor Sweeney), whose primary concerns in life are landing a promotion and an early bedtime. Connor isn’t just uptight — he’s a certified square. Getting told as much by his boss Mr. Buechler (Adam Brooks) and wife Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth) incentivizes him to seek some much needed spontaneity after he’s left home alone one weekend. Well, it’s more like he’s psychically compelled to dial the 1-900-555-FREAKO hotline that’s continually advertised during his favorite antiques program. One call summons the party-rocking Frankie Freako (voiced by Matthew Kennedy) and his freaky comrades, the gunslinging Dottie Danko (Meredith Sweeney) and cybernetically enhanced Boink Bardo (Brooks doing a dozen variations of “Shabadoo!”), who then proceed to mess Connor’s house (and life) up with swinging paint cans and spray-painting “BUTT” all over the walls. Alas, Frankie and friends are the least of Connor’s concerns after they’re all transported to Freako World to answer to President Munch (Red Letter Media’s Rich Evans, a.k.a Dick the Birthday Boy) for Frankie’s rebellious antics against the president’s administration.

Connor Sweeney having a hysterical moment in Frankie Freako. Photo: Shout! Studios

If this all sounds silly and stupid to you, that’s because Frankie is silly and stupid for its own sake. It’s one of those movies where taking any sort of critical eye to its flaws or plot holes is a fool’s errand that makes you look dumb for taking it as anything but what it is (which is silly and stupid). There’s nothing highbrow or thematically shrewd about a bunch of puppets torturing a guy for 85 blissfully entertaining minutes. And there shouldn’t be. Puppet mayhem is one of cinema’s basest pleasures, right up there with people in rubber monster suits (see Kotanski’s previous endeavor Psycho Goreman) and bad dummies getting thrown off buildings. Not a minute went by when I wasn’t pointing at the screen and squealing with delight at a puppet waddling around like a toddler or getting chucked across the screen by someone just off camera. With his special effects background in the Astron-6 collective, Kotanski is a filmmaker who’s dedicated to reviving the kind of low-budget genre offerings B-movie producer Charles Band used to stock Blockbuster shelves with. Like Psycho Goreman, Frankie’s unbeatable charm emanates from its practical effects work and creature design. Besides Kotanski’s detailed and articulate puppets, Frankie offers gaping neck wounds, tiny squibs, and a barrel of glue getting dumped on a character who then spends the remainder of the movie stuck to the floor.

What Frankie Freako most reminded me of was Bo Welch’s much maligned cinematic nightmare, The Cat in the Hat. As a former hyperactive millennial child, I have a lot of nostalgia for the live action Dr. Seuss adaptation wherein Mike Meyers — in a horrifying fur suit — shows a pair of behaviorally maladjusted siblings how to (responsibly) let loose by ruining Alec Baldwin’s life. This comparison will either raise red flags or come off as an enthused endorsement: it will depend on your level of taste and age bracket. But I can assure you, it’s the latter. Besides the broad overlaps in plot, Frankie Freako parlays a similar dedication to maximalism, albeit at a much lower budgetary level and without the preexisting IP to riff on. What Kotanski and Shout! Studios accomplish with a few million dollars is inspired by a wholehearted embrace of tacky ’80s artifice. The bricks are glass, the plants are fake, and the sculptures are ugly, which makes it all the more pleasurable to see Frankie and friends deface everything in sight. Freako World itself is a nightmare realm realized through the most adorable miniature set pieces and some harsh neon lighting. Simple delights, but these stylistic flourishes animate a movie undeniably made by people passionate for a particular era of B-movie filmmaking synonymous with Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, and Frank Henenlotter.

All of this is to say I had an absolute blast with Frankie Freako. With awards season looming and every critic sharpening their knives to prepare an incisive take ready for print, it’s a nice reprieve to just kick back, turn your brain off, and watch unapologetic nonsense. If puppets fucking with people is your jam, then Frankie and his pals will fit right in with your Gremlins, your Critters, and your Ghoulies. But not your Things. Thank god not your Things.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.

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