★½                 By Z.P. Kibbleworth               September 4, 2089

The setup of the new prospective blockbuster FREAK is as follows: in the not-too-distant future, a crew of astronauts exploring other galaxies land and set up camp on a promising new planet: one with water, vegetation, and a vast network of caves that go deep beneath the planet’s surface. The astronauts speculate that there may be valuable ore to be found in these caves, and begin exploring them. One of the astronauts, deep within one of the caves, discovers a cavern where dozens of tiny alien creatures are nesting. One gets excited and begins to crawl up his leg, and the astronaut freaks out, shoots it several times with his subtly-named death zapper, and flees. Of course, that little alien had a mother who now has a vendetta against this astronaut and his crew, and in addition the chaotically fired death zaps have irradiated the cavern and begin triggering mutations for the aliens. Thus, we have a film about a small crew on a faraway world under attack by a continually evolving alien creature. If that sounds like a movie you’ve seen before, that’s because it probably is. FREAK is a blatant rip-off of François Von Curd’s 2066 classic Invader, and one that completely defaces everything that made that film exceptional.

On a technical level, the difference between the two films is night and day. Invader was a tight 100 minutes of sequence after sequence of suspense and terror, mixed in with a morbid sense of awe. The film built powder-keg tension, with extended scenes of quiet and emptiness that steadily accumulated a sense of urgency before exploding in short bursts of chaos and violence. It was a film that made you regulate your breathing and clasp your fingers ever tighter before shocking you at precisely the moment you began to let your guard down. On the other hand, FREAK (which, by the way, is an acronym for Fucking Ridiculously Enormous Alien Killer), possesses none of that craft, and instead relies on a sound mix of intermittent high-pitched blares and the greatest images of destruction a computer can generate to deliver its idea of tension and spectacle.

The precise failings of the film can all be seen in its equivalent to Invader’s iconic hunting scene. In FREAK’s version, the crew ride a futuristic terraprowler into a massive cavern only to find a host of hundreds of FREAKs (although since they haven’t evolved to their massive final form, they are technically MEAKs, for Moderately Enormous Alien Killer) which they proceed to battle in a massive shootout. But this scene contains none of the fear that made Invader’s scene so unforgettable, and is instead all noise. Instead of using darkness so effectively as Invader did to create a sense of paranoia at every sound and movement on the edges of the frame, FREAK keeps its scene in a light that washes out the colors in order to let us see all the alien monsters that were copied and pasted across the frame. Instead of using subjective camera angles to dramatize the realization of the monster’s true size, FREAK barely remembers to keep humans in most of its shots, so we can see the unnaturally smooth scales that some poor VFX laborer wasn’t given enough time to finish even without going home to their parents for weeks. Instead of the scene turning into a frantic dash just to make it out of the forest and survive, FREAK’s scene climaxes in a weightless gunfight that is a cacophony of emptiness. In this scene, the human emotions and experience are shoved to the side for a maximalist approach to spectacle that turns an iconic scene of horror into an utter bore.

What is more disconcerting than FREAK’s inability to understand the fundamentals of suspense or drama, however, is its complete inversion of Invader’s original message. What none of the army of people and cyborgs who mined Von Curd’s classic for all its iconography seemed to realize was that Invader is not a film about killing a big scary alien, but a scathing criticism of Earth’s capitalistic colonialism of the rest of the solar system in the package of a sci-fi horror film. Changing the setting from a terraforming Callisto to a vaguely spooky planet far outside our galaxy, changing the main characters from corporate drones to valiant astronauts completely shifts the film’s symbolism from precise to undefined. Changing the depiction of the film’s central monster from an outgrowth of a forcibly altered environment to a mere assemblage of various scary features destroys any notion of the creature’s attacks being a natural response to human infringement, instead making it a big evil monster just for the sake of having a big evil monster. The ultimate death of the monster in Invader that also brings about the destruction of the terraforming base is a scene of tragedy embedded in poetic justice; the film draws attention to the creature’s pain as it strives to defend its home from the humans that want to raze it. The climax of FREAK, on the other hand, glorifies the slaughter of the alien creatures with gratuitous slow-motion and cringeworthy guitar riffs. Anyone who passed 10^th-grade literature can figure out that the title of Invader is a double entendre; it is the humans, not the monster, who are really invading. Everyone behind FREAK seemed to somehow miss that.

Why am I so keen on comparing this film to a decades-old certified classic? Why, I hear some readers moaning, can’t I just accept FREAK as a big dumb popcorn movie that can be entertaining on its own? For one thing, I believe that if you are going to more or less plagiarize someone else’s work of art, you should at least have the decency to try and do so with quality and respect. Second, the film’s inability to grasp even the most basic of themes speaks to the increasing death of artistry within industry cinema. This was a film conceived not by committed individuals who hold a personal stake in their work, but by the soulless clump of executives at Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios and their nebulous filmmaking method known as “The Process.” What we get from them, in addition to a totally flat and tedious film, is the irony of a film criticizing the evisceration of an environment for capitalistic purposes being itself eviscerated for capitalistic purposes. It’s not an encouraging sign for the future of cinema.