Weird Little Guys Invade a Yuppie’s House in Wacky Horror-Comedy Frankie Freako

When it comes to pop culture, sometimes we’re nostalgic for the wrong things. There’s nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia, but it often invites the impulse to place everything under the banner of “Hey, wasn’t this great?” without any sense of interrogation or even basic understanding of the source. It’s easy enough to check off the music, wardrobe and cars of the 1980s, but there’s also a sense of pace, and tone, and Reaganite excess that gets lost in translation when attempting to revive the sensibilities of that era. That’s a shame, because a filmmaker who actually understands those elements can get a lot of mileage out of them, and turn nostalgia into something more rewarding. Frankie Freako, the zany and goopy latest from director Steven Kostanski (Psycho Goreman) is a film that, at the very least, understands the elements of ’80s nostalgia that other films often forget.

Built from the same little monster framework as stuff like the Gremlins and Critters series, Frankie Freako is an unapologetically weird, esoteric ride through a very particular kind of ’80s movie, complete with what feels like an absolute suspension of the rules of reality. That makes it, at minimum, refreshing, and at its best, wildly entertaining.

Conor (Conor Sweeney) is a yuppie who thinks that adding color ink to his work presentations at his humdrum office job counts as edgy. He’s so repressed that he finds cuddling with his wife (Kristy Wordsworth) to be the ultimate sexual experience, and calls ordering pizza on a night home alone partying. This is all perfectly fine with Conor, but when both his wife and his boss (Adam Brooks) accuse him of being a little too square, it shakes something loose in his brain. Determined to prove that he’s not a total wet blanket, Conor decides to call a party hotline run by a punk rock-looking creature who calls himself “Frankie Freako.” Frankie looks like a cross between a gremlin and a member of GWAR, and talks like it too. He’s also got some kind of strange power to travel along phone lines, so when Conor makes the call and confirms that he’s down to party, Frankie and his pals just drop on by, and unleash total chaos in their wake.

Kostanski is, by his own admission, trafficking in some very familiar ’80s stuff here, ranging from Weird Science to Ghoulies Go to College. It’s that classic Animal House by way of Evil Dead II thing that pits people who cling to a rigid set of rules against people (and other beings) who care not one whit for said rules, and on that level it plays perfectly. Kostanski knows exactly which strings to pull and when, giving us note-perfect recreations of ’80s party scenes (random dirty words spray painted on walls, crushed cans laying everywhere) and of the uptight yuppie in the room who can’t stand the sight of it all. It’s fun to watch, even if you feel like you’ve seen it all before.

Then, something interesting happens. Frankie Freako goes further than its unofficial sources, digging deep and wiggling around in the furthest corners of this particular sandbox. Sweeney plays Conor as a twisted cross between college yuppie from the ski lodge and Standard Sitcom Dad, imbuing him not just with uptightness but with a sense that his world is Fixed, immovable as stone, and that he can always reset it if he just says the right words or makes the right over-the-top gesture. Frankie and his fellow alien freaks, meanwhile, are the antithesis of this idea, not just breaking the illusion of Reagan’s perfect America but breaking the molds into which that illusion has been poured like plaster. There’s a surrealistic depth to the way the film deploys this, from having Conor flat-out try a sitcom finish (freeze frame and all) on his wife at one point, to soda cans emblazoned with the word “fart.” It’s strange enough, and detailed enough, to make us look a little closer, and realize that this isn’t just nostalgia. It’s ripping simplified nostalgia to shreds, immersing itself in something as close to real ’80s little monster filmmaking as it can possibly find, and rolling in it like a pig in shit.

That ethos, of course, extends directly into the visual effects, including creature designs by Action Pants FX and production design by Joshua Turpin. Frankie and his pals, and the wider world from which they originate, are rendered in a way that’s both classic and convincing to modern eyes, a perfect encapsulation of the film’s ability to be both nostalgic and singular. The creatures are worthy of two sequels at least, packaged in nice VHS boxes, but it’s when we get into miniatures and peeks into alien worlds that Frankie Freako really soars. It’s not what the film’s about, necessarily, but it is what happens when a movie dives headlong into the full-on weirdness of its premise, and you’ll wish there was more of it.

With that in mind, Frankie Freako certainly has its limitations. It’s packaged as light sci-fi/horror-comedy fare, and functions as such, its larger nostalgic commentary existing only as background to an excuse to have a lot of fun with creatures and sight gags. It never quite goes as far as you’d hope in the first two acts, and by the time its fullest ambitions show up, it feels just a hair too late. Still, it’s hard to be upset by those things when everyone involved is clearly having so much fun. Frankie Freako is an example of what happens when a gifted genre filmmaker understands that throwback movies are about so much more than song choices and big hair, and that depth of understanding produces delightful results. It’s Gremlins by way of Tim & Eric, and that alone is enough to make it one of the year’s most fun cinematic curiosities.

Director: Steven Kostanski
Writer: Steven Kostanski 
Stars: Conor Sweeney, Kristy Wordsworth, Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy
Release Date: October 4, 2024

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.