FREAKED

Ricky Coogan is a successful actor and one day is commissioned by a large chemical company to sponsor in Santa Flan a new product, the Zygrot-24. Once arrived in Santa Flan, Ricky, along with his friend Ernie and the young ecologist Julie, will decide to visit Freak Land, a dirty "circus" whose only attraction are the "freaks of nature" more commonly known as freaks. They do not know, however, that the owner of the museum, Elijah Skuggs, is a madman who uses Zygrot-24 to turn the visitors of his traveling circus of horrors into horrific and revolting creatures. Produced in the early nineties, this "Freaked" has almost nothing to do with the horror genre but rather appears as a fun slapstick comedy. The film, directed by Tom Stern and Alex Winter (also an actor), manages to easily entertain and amuse the viewer, relying on a solid screenplay, great makeup effects, and a decent cast. The movie, although it could have had great potential to offer us more than a decent horror film, decides to abandon the horror path to take the opposite road, that of slapstick comedy; a good idea anyway, since the film manages to fully achieve its goal of entertaining the viewer. Starting from a good basic idea that explicitly pays homage to "Freaks" by Tod Browning, the screenplay continues with a more than sufficient screenplay that manages to keep the film's mood always quite high, avoiding creating dead or flat scenes, so much so that it makes the viewer passionate about a decidedly stupid story. The staging of makeup effects that are really well done follows, which undoubtedly constitute the strong point of the film and, even when they may seem rather crude, appear very ironic and cartoonish and thus manage to be charming and fascinating. Even the special effects, used in minimal part and made with the primitive technique of stop-motion, are so exaggerated that they are appreciated and perfectly suited to the type of film The cast is convincing and the actors all manage to perfectly embody their role as fools; among the many stand out the director himself Alex Winter, in the role of the protagonist, Randy Quaid ("Independence Day"), in the role of the villain of the turn, and a famous Mr. T ("Rocky 3"; the TV series "A-Team") who here wears the clothes of the bearded lady! In conclusion "Freaked - Sgorbi" is a film with a high level of stupidity, which has little to do with the horror genre, but which is quite fun and in some scenes even comic. Recommended for lovers of slapstick horror films, not recommended instead for those who are looking for a film that manages to scare.