Steven Kostanski and the movies that he’s made with Astron-6 have always entertained me. Whether satirizing giallo with The Editor, making a perfect John Carpenter movie with The Void or creating 80s rental movies out of time like Psycho Goreman and Manborg, the movies that result are always great.

Inspired by the movies that ripped off Gremlins like Ghoulies, The Gate and Critters, Franky Freako takes place at some time in the 1980s, a time in which Conor (Conor Sweeney) is accused by his wife Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth) and boss Mr. Buechler (Adam Brooks) of being boring and way too uptight. As she goes away on a business trip, he decides to call the 1-900 number of Franky Freako (Matthew Kennedy) and gets pulled into the insane party world of the mini monster and his crew of oddballs.

Along with his friends Dottie Dunko and Boink Bardo, Franky brings the party into Conor’s life and by that, I mean he destroys his house and somehow drags him to his world, a place run by Freaklord President Munch that feels a lot like the future where Biff became President in Back to the Future Part II.

I wonder if 1-900-555-FREAKO is a real number. Every movie — well, every horror movie made in the 80s, it seemed — had numbers like that. This is a movie made for people that get the joke that Conor’s boss is named for John Carl Buechler, that wished that they’d make more of the Hobgoblins movies and that hoped for Ghoulies V: Ghoulies Get Jobs. I made that up, but wouldn’t that have been a good one?

For the rest of the world, you may wonder why this spent so much on practical little people partying and not get it. Your life is infinitely boring compared to the rest of us.