Before the opening credits even begin to roll, the words “YOU HAVE BAD TASTE” flash on screen. You have to respect a movie this honest. Live Freaky, Die Freaky is a stop-motion animated musical-comedy directed by John Roecker, with voiceovers from rock stars such as Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, The GoGo’s Jane Wiedlin, Transplants/Blink-182’s Travis Barker and a slew of others.
The movie opens in a post- apocalyptic 3069 where a scavenging nomad finds a copy of the book Helter Skelter in the sand and interprets it as a Biblical text, with Charles Manson as the messiah. A flashback to 1969 follows with a puppet manifestation of the Manson family, as they spread their great message of love though “music, murder and mayhem.”
Live Freaky is vulgar, tasteless and crude, which is exactly what the film intends to be. It’s funny in a blind-guy-falling-down-an-open-manhole sort of way. Intellectually you know what you’re seeing is awful, but it might still make you laugh. When the pregnant Sharon Hate buried her face in a mountain of coke and said “You know, I’m snorting for two now,” it got a chuckle out of me but I couldn’t blame the couple a few rows below me for getting up and leaving. It takes a special kind of sick puppy to find this movie absolutely hilarious.
Live Freaky gets frustrating when its efforts to disturb become too self-conscious. Live Freaky sacrifices pace in favor of trying to disgust the viewer. Characters launch into drawn-out diatribes about the cheese smell of European foreskin, or the sexual prowess of the mentally disabled, that will leave you more bored than shocked. This slows down the movie, making it seem longer than it actually is.
When you think stop-animation you usually think Christmas specials. Well, this has a lot more gore than Rudolph, and you won’t see this much full-frontal in Frosty the Snowman. It’s the juxtaposition of this wholesome medium and Live Freaky’s subject matter that makes it so eerie.
Musical interludes contribute to the eeriness, though you won’t find any death-metal rock here, only cute, catchy rock ballads. If nothing else, you’ll leave with a few new tunes you can’t get out of your head.
Roecker didn’t make Live Freaky, Die Freaky looking for an Oscar. It’s a sick joke made for midnight screenings. The opening credits put it perfectly. If you’re sitting down to watch Live Freaky, Die Freaky, you have bad taste—and this movie won’t disappoint.
