Review: Freaks

7 year-old Lexy Kolker lives with her father Emile Hirsch, though at the moment it doesn’t look like much of a life. The house is boarded up, and Hirsch refuses to let the girl outside. One day a series of events see the young girl finding her way outside, where she walks up to an ice-cream van driven by an elderly man (Bruce Dern, in probably his best performance in decades). The old man offers her a ride, she accepts. I mean, free ice cream? Who would turn that down? Oh, stranger danger you say? Never mind that, because pretty soon the old man is claiming to be Kolker’s grandfather and is asking her all sorts of weird questions about special powers and people bleeding from the eyes. Turns out Kolker is indeed special, and there are shadowy government-types (led by Grace Park) after ‘freaks’ like her.

 

A terrific Bruce Dern performance is wasted in this uninteresting and unoriginal sci-fi flick from 2019. Co-writer/co-director team Zach Lipovsky (director of the terribly cheap “Tasmanian Devils” with Danica McKellar) and Adam B. Stein (who has a background in TV and short films) take influence from so many sources here without adding very much new to the table until it’s too late. Even then it’s a dud. There’s a mixture of interesting and irritating, but mostly just tired and unoriginal. I couldn’t get into it despite a fairly decent cast.

 

“X-Men”, “Room”, Stephen King (especially “Firestarter” and “The Shining”), and “The X-Files” are the main influences you’ll probably spot, possibly even more that I missed. Meanwhile, what little of this is original is sadly heavy-handed and stupid. The political allusions are delivered in sledgehammer fashion, and the whole thing goes completely off the rails after about an hour. In fact, I think I liked the parts of the film that were unoriginal a lot better than when it started telling its own story in the back-end and explaining everything.

 

Disappointingly unoriginal film with zero subtlety, a total mess. The performances are mostly fine (Bruce Dern is 80+ and going strong), but I needed a lot more than that.

 

Rating: D+

 

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