A horror spinoff of the body-swap "Freaky Friday" concept, Freaky (2020) is also a better remake of Rob Schneider's slapstick comedy The Hot Chick (2002). Starring Vince Vaughn as the Blissfield Butcher and Kathryn Newton as 17-year-old Millie Kessler, Freaky meshes the comedic premise of a high school teen girl body-swapping with a creepy older man with the visceral gore sensibilities of the slasher genre. Attempting to kill Millie with an ancient ceremonial dagger, Vaughn's Blissfield Butcher unintentionally triggers Freaky's body-swap curse, leaving Millie only 24 hours to undo the cursed magic, lest she remain looking like a middle-aged maniac forever.
In The Hot Chick, instead of a ceremonial dagger, high school teen Jessica Spencer (Rachel McAdams) swaps bodies with small-time criminal Clive Maxtone (Schneider) through the magic powers of ancient enchanted earrings. Similarly, the two have to race against the clock to reverse the magic and return to their former selves or stay trapped in each other's bodies forever. However, in both tone and comedic sensibility, The Hot Chick drastically differs from Freaky, deploying Schneider's signature slapstick sense of humor without Freaky's maniac slasher horror elements.
More than just a spookier remake of The Hot Chick, Freaky is an outright better version of The Hot Chick, thanks in large part to the surprisingly tender emotional core to Vaughn and Newton's body-swap comedy-horror. Whereas The Hot Chick primarily uses the gender swap conceit for a series of cheap gags, Freaky, despite being a horror movie, takes time to earnestly explore the implications of this swap. This is most notable in the budding romance between Millie, in the Butcher's male body, and her love interest Booker Strode, a soul-to-soul connection that sees the two kiss.
Interestingly, Freaky also establishes Millie as a somewhat scraggly, bullied misfit, as opposed to a self-absorbed "hot chick," à la McAdam's Jessica Spencer in The Hot Chick. Seeing herself possessed by the spirit of the Blissfield Butcher, who dons Millie's body with a "killer" sense of fashion and self-confident demeanor, Millie undergoes a more satisfying character arc than McAdam's Spencer. In a way, the Blissfield Butcher represents Millie's "shadow" self, in a Jungian sense, the darker side of Millie's psyche that she must learn to confront and incorporate to become a fuller, more assured version of herself by the story's end.
Though not exactly a comparison between apples and oranges, Freaky and The Hot Chick do differ drastically enough for each film to satisfy separate cinematic needs. No doubt, any Schneider fan knows exactly what they're getting with The Hot Chick and their expectations don't necessarily include any of the heartfelt drama and tender moments of Freaky. All the same, by fleshing out its lead roles into more complicated, three-dimensional characters, Freaky takes the funny teen girl/creepy old man body-swap premise of The Hot Chick and makes it even better.
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