There are certain directors, Abel Ferrara and Gregg Araki to name two, that I have terminally mixed feelings towards. At one end, I admire what they're trying to do a good percentage of the time, and can see that they're trying to do something different with genre conventions. And yet, somehow, the films themselves just aren't that good. In fact, many of them are downright awful.
Freak is like that.
On the surface, it's a simple, straightforward Halloween knock-off about a mental patient in a mask that covers his face who killed his mother as a child, and in the present day, has escaped from being transported to a new facility in order to stalk his younger sister Jodi. Instead of focusing on a whole group of irritating teens, Freak chooses to follow only Jodi and her adoptive older sister Stacy on the road to a new home. So, instead of a bunch of useless caricatures, we get two well-established characters. This is good. While it could have easily been set up for Jason to emerge as an obvious love interest for Stacy, the two mostly just take turns ignoring and being irritated by each other, choosing to focus mostly on the task at hand.