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Freckled Max and the Spooks AKA Pehavý Max a strasidlá (Blu-ray)
Blu-ray A - America - Deaf Crocodile Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (12th July 2025). |
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The Film
 Orphaned prostitute's son Max (Martin Hreben) has tired of being mistreated by the traveling circus that took him in and escapes as the troupe passes through "vampire country" where he meets water spirit Alojz (Alphaville's Eddie Constantine) who trades fresh-caught fish in the village for booze. When they overhear blacksmith/amateur inventor Humschmied (Uprising's Andrej Hryc) telling the villagers that Dr. Henry Frankenstein (The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday's Bolek Polívka) is following in his ancestor's footsteps and creating a monster, Alojz and Max race to the castle ahead of the torch-bearing mob to warn the castle's inhabitants including Count Dracula (The Fearless Vampire Killers' Ferdy Mayne) who brought Frankenstein the brain of a recently-deceased genius for his monster, the spectral White Lady Alzbeta (Beyond the Walls' Mercedes Sampietro) - who might be Countess Bathory (later the subject of director Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory: Countess of Blood) – librarian Talbot (Suspiria's Flavio Bucci) who likes his meat extremely rare, fire spirit Sepp (The Neverending Story's Tilo Prückner), and the newly brought-to-life creature Albert (Gerhard Karzel). Humschmied's bombs manage to destroy the laboratory and damage the castle, but Frankenstein's aunt Hanna (Creepshow's Viveca Lindfors) soon arrives from Yorkshire to put things right, rallying Max, the monsters, and Albert dug out of the rubble into restoring the castle. When Albert becomes curious about the female sex, he escapes the castle in search of a bride. Wanting to destroy the seemingly indestructible monster, Humschmied tries to trick him into romancing his sister Bertha (Gail Gatterburg) but young Max is the only one who suspects Albert is in danger. When Max uses Sepp's firepower to rescue Albert in proximity of his stash of gunpower, pharmacist's daughter Klara (Nosferatu in Venice's Barbara de Rossi) comes to his aide and is charmed by the monster's childlike nature. When Albert recovers, the castle's monsters advise him on courting her, but her mother (Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea's Marie Drahokoupilová) will go to any lengths to ensure a more lucrative and less scandalous match for her daughter to the mayor's diminutive son (Horror Story's Roman Skamene). Based on the children's novel "Frankenstein's Aunt" by Alan Rune Pettersson, Freckled Max and the Spooks began life as a Austrian/Czechoslovakian/West German/French/Spanish/Italian co-production miniseries of seven episodes running over six hours. IMDb lists a 1988 date for the series broadcast in Czechoslovakia while the one-hundred minute feature-length abridgment played in 1987. The first two fifty-minute episodes makes up roughly the first thirty-odd minutes of the film. While the editing feels choppy, the story is easy enough to follow while consulting the miniseries fills in some of the gaps. Some of the material seems superfluous including Humschmied spying on Frankenstein's operation – in the film it appears that he surmises what the doctor is doing by the sight of kites being flown above the castle in an electrical storm – a more leisurely introduction for Hanna to the castle's inhabitants, and their attempts to frighten her away before she reveals that she has no plans to sell the castle but to fix it up (also deleted are scenes in which Hanna attempts to secure workers among the superstitious locals). Hanna also does not know that Max has been in the castle, finding him being mistreated at the local pub where he has found work and shelter since the lab explosion and decides to take him in. Some other deletions are bewildering but equally superfluous including the revelation that the library Talbot is a werewolf (we only see him transform in the miniseries while in the feature he just seems like a ghoul apart from being allergic to silverware). The bulk of the film focuses on Albert's love life and Humschmied's attempts to destroy him. Short shrift given to the secret between the Countess and Igor and Max's attempts to combat the ghost of the knight Iron Theodore who haunts the pair along with Alojz carrying a torch for the Water Lady, Sepp's romance with Bertha, and the flirtation between Dracula and Hanna. All of these relationships tie into the theme that lonely humans and lost loves are the humans that become ghosts and that the power of love makes even monsters human – unlike Frankenstein: The True Story's dreamy monster who starts rotting, Albert gradually becomes handsome as he becomes less concerned with "impressing" Klara than being someone worth loving through his own personal growth – which is why Max after breaking a curse or two on the inhabitants of the castle must venture out into the world himself. One of many Czech and Slovak filmmakers whose career suffered in the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the censoring and banning of anything that seemed remotely subversive, Slovak director Jakubisko had previously helmed the fanciful Birds, Orphans, and Fools but it was not until the eighties that he dabbled in the popular Eastern European and Soviet genre of children's films first with The Feather Fairy and then with the Austrian/Czechoslovakian/West German/French/Spanish/Italian co-production miniseries and the resulting feature cut under review. While we have not seen the former children's film, presumably some of the more macabre design elements and effects are the input of artistic collaborator Jan Svankmajer whose own films like Alice were unsettling fusions of live action, stop motion, puppetry, and animation. Keeping the film from getting too "grim" (or "Grimm") is the scoring of Guido de Angelis (Yor: The Hunter from the Future) although some of the suspense music does sound like a reworked cue from the gory eighties giallo A Blade in the Dark. Although the art direction of Milos Kalina could fit a Gothic horror film, the costumes of Claudia Stich and the photography of Jakubisko-regular Ján Duris are in keeping with the look of both a fairy tale film and an eighties television miniseries with bright, saturated colors and the occasional filter work. While we have no idea of the rationale for the feature recut of a six plus hour series – presumable something to do with government funding and studio bookkeeping – Freckled Max and the Spooks is as minor Jakubisko as the miniseries is a major work in his filmography simply by its co-production scale. 
Video
Released in most of its co-production territories in the miniseries version – it appears that only Germany has put it out on DVD twice in 2008 and 2016 – Freckled Max and the Spooks has only previously been available on DVD in Slovakia with optional English and Slovak subtitles. Deaf Crocodile's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.37:1 fullscreen Blu-ray – also available in a deluxe limited edition with a hard slipcase and sixty-page booklet directly from Deaf Crocodile as well as DiabolikDVD – comes from a new restoration by the Slovak Film Institute that is free of any obvious damage or even light scratches. Presumably this is a dupe negative element and the camera negative was not touched to do such an extensive recut. Opticals look a shade coarser and some lens filters impeded fine detail in all but the brightest shots and close-ups. The opening credits were video-generated on the television masters but it appears as though optical credits were created just for this version (the title card itself might have been recreated). 
Audio
The Slovak LPCM 2.0 stereo track is entirely post-dubbed and we have no idea the extent to which some of the dialogue might have been rewritten to cover the gaps in the story but the track is free of archival damage and the stereophonic effects are used conservatively for explosions, the synth score, and most cleverly when the Dracula demonstrates the radio communications of his bat network by raising one wing and then both. Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan who discusses the series and feature version in the context of European fairy tale films of the seventies and eighties and Jakubisco's career (noting parallels between his depiction of the intolerant villagers and his earlier ethnographic studies of post-war Czechoslovakian village life). Deighan also notes that Max is the focus of the adaptation whereas Frankenstein's aunt is the main character in the novel, discussing both as a homage not to the original run of Universal horrors but to their "monster mash" sequels which tended to be campier along with Young Frankenstein, as well as background on the international co-production funding, the resulting cast, and the requirements of each country to appeal to their audiences. The disc also includes a trio of new interviews. In Ján Ďuriš, director of photography (26:40), Ďuriš reveals he was aware of Jakubisko's work while in school but it was only luck that he was appointed to work with him on a documentary and was asked by the director to work on subsequent films. In Petra Galková, assistant director (17:54), Galková recalls getting to work on the film because she was fluent in German and describes the international co-production as "vibrant and thrilling" even though they knew that there were Secret Police among the crew. She nevertheless reveals that she was fired and barred from working for ten years after the production due to the perception that she had too much contact with the Westerners and she was consigned to the archives and ended up leaving. In Rastislav Steranka, Director of the National Cinematographic Centre of the Slovak Film Institute (17:06), Steranka discusses the goals of the Slovak Film Institute initially in archiving and later publication digitization, distinguishing the Slovak industry from the Czech, how a number of Slovak films were produced by the Czechs and held by their archives, as well as their history of co-productions (particularly with Poland). He also provides an overview of the major Slovak works including those that were the real start of what has been called the Czech New Wave including The Sun in the Net, Jakubisko's Birds, Orphans and Fools, and Dragon's Return while also noting that a lot of the Slovak directors were educated at the Czech school FAMU.  "Film about Film [Film o filme]" (4:43) is a 1986 behind the scenes look at the miniseries and feature by Rudolf Ferko looking at the international cast, the village and castle locations, as well as a look at Dracula's flying effects. "Portrait of a Film Director [Portrét režiséra]" (42:27) is a 1989 documentary on director Juraj Jakubisko by Matej Mináč featuring filmmaker Federico Fellini shot during the production of Sitting on a Branch, Enjoying Myself after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Jakubisko's enforced "haitus" from feature filmmaking. The piece gives a very homey look at the director's life as he discusses the film's autobiographical aspects, putters about his kitchen, shows the camera some of the drawings he made – his cinematographer noted that he sketched out visual ideas not storyboards – along with clips from his earlier films as he discusses them. Fellini appears in snippets of an interview praising a sheepish Jakubisko sitting beside him. "Frankenstein's Faster, or Frankenstein's Aunt: The Novel That Became Freckled Max" (27:55) is a 2025 video essay by journalist and physical media expert Ryan Verrill (The Disc Connected) and film professor Dr. Will Dodson partially reading and synopsizing the novel, revealing the substantial differences between the adaptation and the source in which Frankenstein's aunt arrives some years after Frankenstein's experiment, brings the monster back solely to help with the renovation but ends up improving the lives of the creature and the other monsters when faced with opposition from the villagers. 
Packaging
This standard edition has regular keep case packaging while a limited edition is available directly from Deaf Crocodile or DiabolikDVD in a hard slipcase featuring a new illustration by Steve Thomas and including a 60-page illustrated book with essays by screenwriter, playwright and film journalist Steven Peros and film critic and author Walter Chaw.
Overall
A sub-two hour abridgement of a six-hour plus miniseries, Freckled Max and the Spooks is a charming if choppy homage to cinematic and literary monster mashes featuring our favorite ghouls.
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