The paranoiac thriller Freaks — at least at first — has a wonderfully dark idea: A maniacally intense father (the disheveled Emile Hirsch) is keeping his small daughter (the mostly irritating Lexy Kolker) from going outside of their house, mostly for fear that the world will consider her a “freak” and imprison her inside a mountain compound.

As creepy neighbors — usually armed with melty ice cream cones — prowl around her house, it’s easy to think that Dad might be on to something here. But when her ice cream salesman grandfather (a wizened Bruce Dern) shows up, that’s when we learn the truth about the world — it’s some kind of a cheap superhero thing — and it’s really hard to care about any of it anymore.

The “freaks” tend to bleed from their eyes while displaying very cost-effective powers like super-speed, disappearing and telling people what to do, with a killer task force assigned to keep them under control and imprisoned, even though it’s apparently one officer and a hard-nosed agent (Grace Park).

The film was obviously made to cash in on the crop of recent superhero movies — mostly of the mutant variety — which I can understand, but as long as Marvel and DC are pumping these things out on a regular basis, why even bother? Why choose store-brand cereal if you can afford Froot Loops? Why choose Freaks when you can choose X-Men: Dark Phoenix?

Okay, bad example. —Louis Fowler

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If Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the grandaddy of UFO films — and it is — John Coats’ Foes is the step-grandson who belongs to the daughter who got disowned after she got pregnant — the second time, at church camp. But, hey, doesn’t the kid deserve a birthday card at the very least, with or without an enclosed George Washington?

So let us acknowledge Foes. The sci-fi obscurity was written and directed by Coats, in his only work in those roles to date, more or less as an effects showcase. Today, he’s an Emmy-winning effects artist, so as a calling card, it’s obviously successful. For all its ingenuity of depicting flying saucers for next to nothing, however, the film narratively proves to be one tough sit.

At an island lighthouse, a couple (Coats and Jane Wiley) watches in awe as a shiny, silver disc hovers and moves overhead. Meanwhile, at a NORAD command center, Macdonald Carey (Summer of Fear) does a lot of consulting (and, in close up, a little trembling) with a U.S. Air Force general (Jerry Hardin, aka Deep Throat of TV’s The X-Files).

Matte-shot manna, the dead-sober Foes is easy to admire, in an Equinox-y way of not letting one’s imagination be limited by funds, as much as possible. Even if that means your trippy 2001-esque sequence can only be achieved by having your cast members bounce around on a trampoline. —Rod Lott

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