Tom Stern

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) As someone with a specific affection for spoof comedies that lean into absurdity, I have to admit that Freaked was a discovery — it’s a horror comedy that doesn’t have a single qualm about going for big dumb jokes, and it completely flew under my radar. Sure, the production values are on the lower-end of things (makeup budget excepted), and that was never intended to be a production with class — but the tone is often very close to some of the spoof comedies of the 1980s, even if writers/directors Tom Stern and Alex Winter don’t quite manage the same attempt-to-hit joke ratio. Wonderfully weird, it opens with a framing device in which a backlit “disfigured” former child star recounts to a TV show hostess how he got involved in a body-mangling freak show in South America, a situation that shifts into fighting corporate malfeasance by the time the climax rolls around. It’s all weird and unabashedly designed for laughs — there’s scarcely a joke left on the table, especially if you don’t mind the deliberately gross makeup effects used through much of the film. Freaked is not a great movie by any means, but it’s a nice surprise: the film’s production history shows that its budget was abruptly cut toward the end of the shooting by new executives, and that shows most in the lack of polish in the post-production areas. Still, Freaked was never going to be much more than a niche comedy for horror fans and it’s perhaps better than it has remained an underrated curiosity.