Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Anthology films are a tough nut to crack, even in the best of circumstances, because oftentimes a viewer is forced to pit various installments against each other – we can’t help but rank segments, even when we’re trying to evaluate a given work as a singular whole and not by its parts – and very rarely is it possible for that quality to be sustained throughout. There’s a reason you can watch Toby Dammit by itself on the Criterion Channel, after all, and the same should be made available for Gareth Evans’ short in V/H/S 2, given that it’s a fucking awesome tale of cult horror sinking to the bottom of your stomach while the rest of the shit on screen floats out of your short-term memory. But it’s even more difficult when a filmmaker, or pair of filmmakers like Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, decide to eschew the collaborative aspect and go it solo as Romero did with Creepshow. That film feels like the direct inspiration for Freaky Tales, which is a similarly-themed genre riff that, instead of paying homage to a variety of EC Comics’ dime-dreadfuls, is a love letter to two things: The city of Oakland and all sorts of ‘80s cinema. It is significantly better at the former than it is at the latter, but when the two synch up in the film’s back half, Fleck and Boden get close to the kind of riotous crowd-pleasing that they intended for it from the first minute.
Our frame is this: It’s May ’87, and weird shit is happening in the Bay. Things seem pretty normal: Punks are scrapping with skinheads at Operation Ivy shows; hip-hop is taking straight-up center stage at the hottest clubs; corruption remains endemic in the police force; and the Warriors are getting their asses handed to them by the Showtime Lakers. But a green aura – a force of destiny and sheer will power – has hung in the sky, often coming down as lightning bolts from the darkened sky. This enables our protagonists in each story to do something that they never thought possible, be it because they don’t have the courage, in the case of one-half (Normani) of a Salt-N-Pepa-like duo when they try to battle one of the Bay’s biggest stars, or because they’re physically out-matched, like the two punks-in-love (Jack Champion and Michelle Farrah Huang) who take to the streets with nail-ridden two-by-fours and chains to fuck up some neo-nazis. But it might also be something a little deeper – a loan shark’s fixer (Pedro Pascal) summoning up the power to do what he needs to escape his job and start fresh, or Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis) dropping 51 on Magic and Kareem to give the Dubs a moral victory. The key aspect is that they’re all underdogs, and this is a movie about an underdog city getting its day, and sometimes that day happens to be blood-soaked and brutal in its righteousness. All of the stories intersect, Pulp Fiction-style, but some have more weight than others.
Fleck and Boden clearly have a deep affection for all things Oakland and do their personal best to preserve the feel and culture of the city as it existed in ’87, at least as it did on-screen. There’s so much rich detail on display here, from the winky asides about a certain actor selling dogs at A’s games or having the hip-hop legends of the town play themselves or even the whole of ensuring that they could use Sleepy Floyd’s legendary game as a central focus and have the man present as the fourth story’s main character. The issue is more the structure of Freaky Tales itself: You will have to sit through one decently boring story (the punk stuff suffers from being vaguely done to death, as theoretically righteous as it is, and a level of cutesy that doesn’t really jive with the rest of the movie) and a solid if somewhat weightless one — the hip-hop segment, brought to life by incredible rhymes by Normani and Dominique Thorne in a real swell battle, which doesn’t have the genre pop to it that the other segments do — before it gets to the third story, which is when, at a very specific moment that I will not spoil for you, the film finally takes off.
Part of this is due to the strength of Pascal’s presence: He’s an immensely likable actor, even when he’s doing vaguely immoral shit, and this role sees him embody an Eastwood-like character to the point that his character is named “Clint.” Yet his work here takes what could be a one-note impression and transforms it into something more – which is, namely, an excellent, and I mean excellent, Charles Bronson riff. The man quite literally has a Death Wish, for God’s sake, and a lot of his arc deals with whether or not he’ll go down the Bernie Goetz route. But he’s also paired off with Ben Mendelsohn, playing a sleazy, evil cop sporting a fat suit and an aggressively ugly — yet witty — demeanor, as well as another actor who will not be named. His bummer arc sets up the fourth story beautifully, which is about as swell of a climax that you could hope for, in which Sleepy Floyd becomes the stuff of legend in more ways than one. The ensuing fracas — set to a Metallica classic as well as other hits — sees Fleck and Boden expand their pool of genre film allusions from Repo Man and Scanners and The Decline of Western Civilization Part One, among others to things closer to the modern-day like Blade. Yes, you read that right. Get ready for the Kareem movie you always hoped for after Game of Death, just with a Golden State Warrior in the Bruce Lee yellow, with Ellis serving up whoop-ass to all comers.
I’ll always remain vaguely disappointed that Fleck and Boden went Hollywood after making moving small-scale dramas like Half Nelson and Sugar, but Freaky Tales has something that the MCU doesn’t, which is soul. It makes a nice companion to Blindspotting, which premiered at the festival six years ago (Jesus fucking Christ), in that it eulogizes an Oakland that has faded into cinematic legend and hearsay. But unlike that film, which was mourning the widening chasm that the native sons and daughters of the city were falling into, with the iconic markers of their town slowly starting to leave for Vegas, this is an Irish wake that doubles as a source of inspiration. Boden and Fleck want to tell tales that inspire and remind folks that their city has provided essential contributions to our culture, and the film leaves you with that feeling. It’s just kind of a drag that it takes so long to reach that point, because who knows? Had it been two hours of that goofy, endearing quality that the back half is endowed with, it might have been enough to get people to buy some Currys off the rack at Kohl’s. But that would be Herculean labor, all things considered, and what we’ve wound up with in these Freaky Tales is more than enough for a fun night at the movies.