Home
Home

Freak Out (2004)

DVD Cover (Anchor Bay)
Add to Collection
Sign up to add this to your collection
Add to Favorites
Sign up to add this to your favorites
Overall Rating 55%
Overall Rating
Ranked #9,678
...out of 20,329 movies
Check In? Sign up to check in!

Merv Doody is a true horror aficionado. He's seen it all. That's when fate delivers an inept psycho killer to his doorstep. At first, Merv is interested in not getting killed, but then it becomes something more. He must transform this bumbling reject from the local asylum into the ultimate killing machine. Enlisting the aid of his best friend Onkey, they set about making the best slasher in the world. Forget Jason and Freddy. They're losers. The man with the spatula (that's right, I said spatula. You wanna make something of it, Sissy?) learns his lessons too well. It isn't long before the man with the hockey mask and orange jumper is carving a path of destruction through the sleepy town of Redwater Cove. Merv and Onkey find that they are the only two who can stop the murderous rampage of their own creation. The only question is how do you destroy an unstoppable machine of utter madness? --IMDb
User Image
Review by Chad
Added: November 18, 2006
Good horror parodies are few and far between these days. Sure, you could easily point to the latest Scary Movie release, but those movies (along with most of the other parodies these days) seem to be making fun of the horror genre for a quick buck rather than making truly funny films that us horror fans can enjoy while actually giving us a challenge when it comes to pointing out the numerous references to obscure titles. Freak Out, a film that I've heard nothing but good things about for the last couple of years, was made by a couple of guys who are obviously big fans of horror, and the result is one hell of a funny movie.

Merv Doody (James Heathcote) and Onkey (Dan Palmer) are a couple of horror geeks that have no real direction in life: Merv is content to sit at home and watch horror movies all day, while Onkey spends his days "working" at a local bowling alley. Their lives are about to get interesting, however, as an escaped mental patient has found his way to Merv's house. Instead of calling the police or running around the house screaming like a little girl, Merv decides to make the ultimate serial killer out of this loony, a killer that will rival both Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. There's one little snag in his plans, though: the loony is a vegetarian who speaks with a lisp, and he makes for a pretty lousy killing machine. Indeed, he can't even manage to add to his body count in the middle of the woods - at night - while a couple engage in premarital sex. If that's not a pathetic serial killer, then I don't know what is. Nevertheless, Merv sees some potential in him and puts him through some rigorous horror movie training, and eventually, he has a spatula-wielding psycho on his hands. However, things take a turn for the worse when the loony decides that his newfound friends would make a couple of nice additions to his growing body count.

The best way to describe the feel of this movie is as such: imagine if, during his Bad Taste and Dead Alive days, Peter Jackson had been sent to the UK in order to make a horror comedy along the lines of Shaun of the Dead... only, with a serial killer instead of hordes of zombies. Throw in some of the witty dialogue from Clerks and film it during the eighties (back when the humor was much more over-the-top), and you'd wind up with something similar to Freak Out.

This movie was made for those of us who enjoy the classics. There's an especially great nod to Evil Dead 2, and those of you who survived the onslaught of eighties slasher flicks will surely get a kick out of all of the slasher clichés that are presented here (such as the obligatory shower sequence, a scene that turns out a little different than you may remember it). If you enjoy horror and if you like a good parody film, then you certainly won't find any shortage of laughs from this one.

My only real complaint about it was that I felt some of the running time could have been chopped off to make a more effective film. Some scenes towards the end run for a wee bit too long and do nothing more than establish what we already know, and moving about ten minutes of this from the feature presentation into the "deleted scenes" portion of the DVD would have worked wonders. However, that minor detail certainly doesn't overshadow the goodness of the rest of the film, so it can be forgiven in the grand scheme of things.

Overall, it's worth a rental at the very least. There are some genuinely hilarious scenes, there's some surprisingly good acting (Onkey is by far the best), and it has everything that horror fans could possibly want from a horror / comedy / parody. 7/10.
Ginose #1: Ginose - added February 28, 2007 at 10:11pm
Oaky... it was certainly worht the rental. Preety damned funny. 7.1/10
Sign up to add your comment. Sign up to add your comment.
Recommended Movies
Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape! Scary Movie Bikini Bloodbath Christmas National Lampoon's Class Reunion Bikini Bloodbath Car Wash Severe Injuries Bikini Bloodbath Caesar And Otto's Summer Camp Massacre Stupid Teenagers Must Die! The Blackening Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers Student Bodies Bikini Bloodbath Shakespeare Doom Asylum Decampitated You Can't Kill Stephen King Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon My Name Is Bruce
Layout, reviews and code © 2000-2024 | Privacy Policy
Contact: Join us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Review Updates