Freaky

Freaky Friday
The 13th

Freaky
USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Landon
Blumhouse

Warning: Big spoilers on this one so,
if you want to go in cold then don’t read this yet.

Okay, so this is kinda bizarre but, less than an hour after I came up with a title for my review of Freaky, I found out that one of the original working titles for the film was... Freaky Friday The 13th so... yeah, I guess I joined the dots maybe. Either way... this one wasn’t initially on my watch list (I hate the word Freaky, just one of those things) and I had decided to ignore it but then I found out that, not only was one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, doing the score but that there was also a limited edition CD release (which I obviously pre-ordered). Then my cousin, who moved to Australia, saw it and recommended it to me so, yeah, I caved in and watched it (and then waited 10 months to post this review because it’s only, finally, just come out at the cinema over her in the UK... if I'd had known it was going to get a proper cinema release here then I would certainly have waited for it). Frankly, all the marketing people behind the movie would have needed to do was let me know that the film is written and directed by the same guy who made the truly brilliant Happy Death Day movies (reviewed here and here) and I would have been on board straight away (we need a third movie in that series guys!).

So, just like the first Happy Death Day movie (and, to some extent, the second) was a remake of Groundhog Day, so too is Freaky another ‘horrified’ remake of a popular classic. In this case, the tie in is specifically the Walt Disney movie (and all the other remakes) of Freaky Friday (a film I’ve never watched in either of its incarnations because it has Freaky in the title... see last paragraph) but, those were in turn based on the novel Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers which was, as I’m sure most of you know, cribbed itself from the English literary classic body swap novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey, which in turn was made into TV shows and movies called things like Vice Versa and, of course, the famous Tom Hanks movie using the same concept, Big. So... a movie with a long lineage but, as far as I know, this one has a slightly unique take on the concept in terms of the characters.

In this one we have the main protagonist, Millie, a high school girl played by Kathryn Newton and we also have Vince Vaughn as the Jason Vorhees style serial killer known as The Blissfield Butcher. The Vaughn character initially doesn’t speak, just gives penetrating stares through his hockey mask and, in a pre-credits set up to show how much of a bad person he is, visits violent death to a group of four teenagers in quite gory ways. That’s one of the things which is interesting about this movie in that, although there were stabbings and any manner of deaths in the Happy Death Day franchise series, this film really goes back to late 1970s/1980s slasher levels of goriness. For instance, in this film you will see people stabbed in the eye with packing hooks, split into two pieces by a buzz saw and, in a particularly memorable death in the pre-credits sequence, a person has a broken bottle forced into his mouth and down his throat until we see the shards of glass bloating his neck out and trying to force themselves out again. So, yeah, I don’t know what rating this movie has but it’s definitely got the kind of 'old school 1970s' levels of violence which you just don’t really see done well in slasher movies these days (I’m not sure, at this point, if all this made it into the UK cinema print).

That being said, I really find films with gruesome deaths unwatchable and less than compelling unless  it's either a) an Italian giallo or b) there is substantial other stuff going on in the film to hold the interest and, thankfully, Freaky has that second thing in spades. Just like the Happy Death Day movies, it has a very strong, self aware sort of broad humour running through it and, much of the time, it falls into the realm of comedy more than anything else.

So, anyway, due to an old Aztec (I think) knife, when The Blissfield Butcher tries to stab Millie, he gets chased away but, at the stroke of midnight, Millie and The Butcher swap bodies. And that’s where the real fun begins, as it transpires that the real Millie, inside Vince Vaughn’s body, has to recover the knife from ‘police evidence’ and find The Butcher (inside Millie’s body) and stab him/her before another 24 hours is up or the change will become permanent. Comic shenanigans ensue as Vince Vaughn, effectively playing a teenage girl with a crush on one of her/his classmates, tries to convince his friends of his real identity while hiding from the police. Meanwhile, Kathryn Newton takes on the minimalistic, cold dead stare of a serial killer and starts murdering various people at high school in various, imaginative ways.

And it’s a real pleasure. The film actually feels a little like those Happy Death Day movies so, I’m assuming that this is a certain amount of the director’s style coming to the forefront and he does familiar stuff like the long, sweeping establishing shots following the leads and also splitting the story into chapters by day, counting down from the night of the pre-credits killings until Friday the 13th, when everything is destined to come to a conclusion, one way or another.

Everything’s pretty cool and, like the director’s previous two movies, the teenagers who Millie hangs out with are mostly nice people and so you’re invested in the characters more. Vince Vaughn really plays the comedy routines well and truly lifts the film with his presence. However, Kathryn Newton certainly matches him all the way and switches from teenage angst to deadened psychopath really well... there’s a lot to enjoy in the performances of this movie. And, of course, the great Bear McCreary’s score is another mini masterpiece. This guy writes compelling music for pretty much all of the films he touches, really helping to glue the edits together with his riffs and elevating the movie to another level... this is top notch stuff.

So, yeah, not much else to say other than, Freaky is a great film I can recommend to most lovers of the comedy horror genre. I do look forward to seeing a sequel at some point (although it would be nice to see Vaughn come back for that, somehow, without giving too much away here). If I had a choice I’d really want to see a third Happy Death Day movie before this one though, or, actually, even a double sequel which ties the two franchises together might be nice. Either way, good movie, worth a watch, give it a go.