Freak
EI Independent Cinema
Video, 85 mins., 1999

review by Terry Wickham

A child (we will call Freak) is born with a deformed face. The ashamed mother, who looks at him as a monstrosity, covers his face with a handmade mask and locks him away in attic for years.

The mother ends up having another baby, which is obviously similar to her first deformed child, because she takes the baby and drops it into a burning garbage can outside the house. The mother then goes back in the house, to recover from the flawed pregnancy. Little does she know, the Freak has escaped from his attic chains and finds his sibling in the burning trash can. This leads to the boyÕs retaliation against his abusive mother and freedom from his poverty stricken home.

We then leap ahead 15 years and move into a story of two sisters moving to a new town.

The Freak, now 25 years old has been kept in a mental institution. In the process transferring the Freak to a new location, he escapes and the two different story-lines converge. This leads to a surprising level of suspense. Director Tyler Tharpe does a rather nice job of keeping things subtle and realistic. No over the top gore effects or standard B-movie nudity. This film is aiming for a higher level of achievement and the final product reflects this.

The two sisters Staci (Amy Paliganoff) and Jodi Parker (Andrea Johnson) are very believable characters and we come to care about both of them.

I really liked the Indiana shooting locations. Director Tharpe is obviously a fan of Halloween. We not only know this because of the story-line, use of point of view shots, titles indicating date/time/location, but also because at the end the injured are taken to Carpenter Memorial Hospital and we see a montage of all the locations used in the film where the killer was (just like the end of Halloween).

This the best release IÕve ever viewed from EI Independent Cinema Label.

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