Frankie Freako review – cheap and cheesy comedy horror channels 80s schlock

Ineffectual office worker Conor calls on the services of a gremlin that looks like someone dipped a Muppet in latex, covered it in caustic soda, and ran a car over it a few times Canadian writer-director Steven Kostanski has been one of the creative forces behind a bunch of silly-sweet horror pictures such as The Void and PG: Psycho Goreman that appear to skew towards a younger demographic. Or perhaps his target audience is really the gen X crowd that never outgrew its affection for 1980s fare such as Critters or Gremlins, cheap and cheesy schlock reliant on practical special effects. Luckily, the latter happens to be Kostanski’s speciality; he’s also worked as a prosthetic FX artist on bigger budget films such as Crimson Peak and the TV series Hannibal. All of that comes together for this daft comedy horror farrago, seemingly set in the 80s, about a nebbishy Canadian office worker called Conor (Conor Sweeney). Conor’s beige jumper alone bespeaks a man deeply risk averse and afraid...

What a sad loss – Tom Wilkinson was quietly and consistently wonderful

From The Full Monty to In the Bedroom, Michael Clayton to Eternal Sunshine, the actor – who has died aged 75 – was an intelligent and unshowy delight

For British movie audiences of a certain generation, there is one image of Tom Wilkinson that will always sum up his hold on our hearts: a paunchy, respectable bloke in a dole queue, wearing an anorak over his collar and tie, with a bunch of other depressed but much younger and scruffier males, shyly, almost unconsciously, practising some swaying erotic dance moves to the accompaniment of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff.

He played the upright, uptight Gerald in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty, an ex-supervisor at a Sheffield steel mill who got laid off like the blue-collar workers under him but, unlike them, he initially tries concealing his humiliating unemployment from his wife. But Gerald swallows his pride and joins the bizarre male striptease troupe of blokes whose manhood was once deeply bound up with their role as breadwinners, and who are now symbolically reduced to earning a few pounds revealing this same reduced manhood at the climax of a horribly unsexy dance routine. It was a gloriously tender, funny, sweet-natured and lovable performance from Wilkinson: he was the authority figure, the teacher/boss/dad character who had to get off his high horse and admit that he was as lonely and unhappy and need of help as everyone else. It was a part that Wilkinson instinctively knew how to play by showing the vulnerability within the grumpiness.

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