zettaichan
Joined Aug 2006
Welcome to the new profile
Our updates are still in development. While the previous version of the profile is no longer accessible, we're actively working on improvements, and some of the missing features will be returning soon! Stay tuned for their return. In the meantime, the Ratings Analysis is still available on our iOS and Android apps, found on the profile page. To view your Rating Distribution(s) by Year and Genre, please refer to our new Help guide.
Badges3
To learn how to earn badges, go to the badges help page.
Reviews8
zettaichan's rating
Summary: the Savage Steve Holland-style joke illustrations that accompany the end credits are the best thing about this heavily templated '80s homage. They're a lot of fun. The rest doesn't really get there. It's like a Canva version of Ghoulies Go To College.
I love this creative team's previous work. The Void, Chowboys, Psycho Gorman, yes yes yes. I enjoy the films they're homaging here, from Gremlins to Child's Play to Puppet Master to the barrel-bottom-scraping likes of Hobgoblins and Garbage Pail Kids. I love trash movies in general. I genuinely loved Thankskilling 3. I only sort of regret sitting through Ouija Shark.
So I see the vision here, but it doesn't work. To pull off a pastiche of '80s puppet comedy-horror in 2024, Frankie Freako needs to surprise and build on itself at every turn like Psycho Goreman. But it lacks both the strong central gag of PG (that the little girl was more of a psycho than the title character) and the out-of-nowhere absurdity that popped up in PG's every scene.
This sticks to the '80s kid-friendly lite-horror template so slavishly that there's no room for surprises. Will the uptight yuppie learn to loosen up after a relentless assault of puppet violence and grossouts? I wonder! Will it be zany fun? Not really. The best comic creation here is Conor's incredibly awkward and shady boss, and the film makes the mistake of sidelining him so the other characters can briefly visit another, even cheaper-looking set. Not a good trade-off.
I honestly feel that Thankskilling 3 succeeded much more at doing what this flick tried to do, and believe me, that's not a sentence I ever thought I'd say. If you do watch Frankie Freako, stick around for the comic illustrations that run alongside the end credits. Those were fun and surprising. Wish I'd gotten that from the rest of the movie.
I love this creative team's previous work. The Void, Chowboys, Psycho Gorman, yes yes yes. I enjoy the films they're homaging here, from Gremlins to Child's Play to Puppet Master to the barrel-bottom-scraping likes of Hobgoblins and Garbage Pail Kids. I love trash movies in general. I genuinely loved Thankskilling 3. I only sort of regret sitting through Ouija Shark.
So I see the vision here, but it doesn't work. To pull off a pastiche of '80s puppet comedy-horror in 2024, Frankie Freako needs to surprise and build on itself at every turn like Psycho Goreman. But it lacks both the strong central gag of PG (that the little girl was more of a psycho than the title character) and the out-of-nowhere absurdity that popped up in PG's every scene.
This sticks to the '80s kid-friendly lite-horror template so slavishly that there's no room for surprises. Will the uptight yuppie learn to loosen up after a relentless assault of puppet violence and grossouts? I wonder! Will it be zany fun? Not really. The best comic creation here is Conor's incredibly awkward and shady boss, and the film makes the mistake of sidelining him so the other characters can briefly visit another, even cheaper-looking set. Not a good trade-off.
I honestly feel that Thankskilling 3 succeeded much more at doing what this flick tried to do, and believe me, that's not a sentence I ever thought I'd say. If you do watch Frankie Freako, stick around for the comic illustrations that run alongside the end credits. Those were fun and surprising. Wish I'd gotten that from the rest of the movie.
Reviewers calling this movie different and special missed the '90s, I guess. After Pulp Fiction hit big, endless wannabe auteurs tried to imitate Tarantino in a thousand smarmy, self-referential, ultraviolent movies. Almost 25 years later, Germany made another one. Here it is.
Snowflake pushes it a little further by literally including the screenwriter in the story, but even that isn't new. Every potentially interesting concept here was already done better in Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation in 2002. Hell, it was done better in a Will Ferrell movie, 2006's Stranger Than Fiction.
Any time Snowflake threatens to explore its recursive ideas even a little, it quickly diverts into boring gun violence, interspersed with the occasional dental torture scene or cannibal serial killer for an equally dull and derivative change of pace. If you've ever wanted to be bored by a disemboweling, this is your film. Yes, eventually you'll get to see a blind martial artist fight an electro-powered superhero for about ninety seconds, but you'll have to sit through TWO FULL HOURS of squibs and gouting red corn syrup to get there. There's nothing stylish or inventive about the gun violence; does 'bullets fly, people fall down' even qualify as "action" at this point? It's just padding.
There's just enough here to fill out a trailer and make it look gonzo and inventive, but you could edit Snowflake down to a five minute short without losing much. As it is, the one or two cool moments aren't worth the time investment for the rest of this very boring revenge-cubed plot pile. I can't stress enough that this movie is 121 minutes long and the entire plot is "All characters want revenge on other characters, so everyone onscreen shoots everyone else until they run out of fake blood and go home." Don't waste your time.
Snowflake pushes it a little further by literally including the screenwriter in the story, but even that isn't new. Every potentially interesting concept here was already done better in Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation in 2002. Hell, it was done better in a Will Ferrell movie, 2006's Stranger Than Fiction.
Any time Snowflake threatens to explore its recursive ideas even a little, it quickly diverts into boring gun violence, interspersed with the occasional dental torture scene or cannibal serial killer for an equally dull and derivative change of pace. If you've ever wanted to be bored by a disemboweling, this is your film. Yes, eventually you'll get to see a blind martial artist fight an electro-powered superhero for about ninety seconds, but you'll have to sit through TWO FULL HOURS of squibs and gouting red corn syrup to get there. There's nothing stylish or inventive about the gun violence; does 'bullets fly, people fall down' even qualify as "action" at this point? It's just padding.
There's just enough here to fill out a trailer and make it look gonzo and inventive, but you could edit Snowflake down to a five minute short without losing much. As it is, the one or two cool moments aren't worth the time investment for the rest of this very boring revenge-cubed plot pile. I can't stress enough that this movie is 121 minutes long and the entire plot is "All characters want revenge on other characters, so everyone onscreen shoots everyone else until they run out of fake blood and go home." Don't waste your time.
