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The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Freaky Tales review – fun, scuzzy tribute to the exploitation flick
Ryan Coogler is not the only film-maker this week to have cashed in his Marvel card and made something savagely unexpected. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who burst on to the US indie scene with the lean, hard-edged drama Half Nelson in 2006 and went on to direct Captain Marvel, return to our screens with the grungy homage to exploitation flicks Freaky Tales. The setting for this baggy, loose-limbed anthology of four interconnected stories is Oakland, California, in 1987. But it's a parallel reality in which residents are able to channel a glowing green cosmic energy, and in which real-life basketball legend 'Sleepy' Floyd (Jay Ellis) is recast as a martial arts master in a stab-happy Kill Bill-style revenge spree. It's not clear whether Boden and Fleck are drawing on Tarantino for inspiration or on the same pulpy grindhouse schlock that informed many of his latter-day exploitation flicks. It hardly matters. With its VHS bargain-bin aesthetic, this is scuzzily enjoyable stuff that pits punks against neo-Nazis, Pedro Pascal's beaten-up debt collector against Ben Mendelsohn's chilling corrupt cop; a girl rap duo called Danger Zone against the hip-hop patriarchy. Plus, there's the added bonus of Tom Hanks clearly having the time of his life as a know-it-all clerk at a video rental store. In UK and Irish cinemas
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
A Reagan-era Oakland of punks, basketball and rap battles comes to life in ‘Freaky Tales'
'Freaky Tales,' a choppy curio from the writing-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck ('Half Nelson,' 'Captain Marvel'), is an ode to the Bay Area as a boy might remember it, showcasing three semi-true stories set on May 10, 1987, that gild facts into myth. 'Oakland in '87 was hella wild,' gloats rapper Too Short, the film's narrator. Too Short is onscreen too, in a cameo as a cop. (There's also a version of his younger self played by DeMario Symba Driver.) 'Freaky Tales' gets its title from Too Short's nine-minute song of sexual braggadocio from his 1987 gold record, here foreshadowing a gender-war comeuppance he deserves. That summer, Fleck was a 10-year-old in Berkeley. He was too young to have experienced Too Short's rap battles first-hand, but old enough to lug the energy of that time around as part of his own identity. Fleck and his longtime collaborator Boden translate the feeling of that excitement — that super-sized, should-have-been-there high — into snapshots of a beaten-down city that can, on occasion, fight back and win. Most of the places and some of the people are real. But the star is the movie's hyperactive, even overwhelmingly contradictory nostalgia. Not only does the film feign to be on VHS with white static tickling through the segment breaks, it also has cigarette burns on the upper corners of the frame to pretend we're also simultaneously watching it on a 35mm reels at the local theater. Sometimes action scenes are juiced up with cartoonish doodles and sound effects; sometimes, the action is all cartoon. I'm sure the filmmakers know that Oakland's Grand Lake Theater wasn't showing 'The Lost Boys' that May. (It wouldn't open until July.) But I'm pretty sure they don't care. It's all about the vibes, dude. The movie is divided into four sections with three groups of heroes: punks, rappers and the Golden State Warriors who were in the NBA playoffs against the Los Angeles Lakers, the 'Showtime' team that would go on win the championship. On this particular night, however, game four of a potential Lakers sweep, Golden State point guard Sleepy Floyd (here played by Jay Ellis) refused to lose. He scored 29 points in the fourth quarter, a post-season record that still stands despite future Warriors like Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant trying their damnedest to knock it down. Floyd's big night is real and you can find archival footage of it online, including Floyd's court side interview with a local sportscaster who describes the player's success in mystical terms. Floyd, the newsman says, played so tr\nscendently it was like he was 'unconscious' — he went to 'another realm,' 'that other zone.' The filmmakers have taken that idea of metaphysics and spun it into a phony religion with Floyd hosting TV commercials for Psytopics, a mindfulness camp where fellow Bay residents can train their brain to battle both 'inner and outer demons.' For him, that presumably includes Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, although the script will eventually have its fictionalized Floyd beheading more hostile bad guys with a ninja sword. Three of the story arcs follow a simple plan: An underdog fights and wins. The fourth section, wedged in the middle, is a fabricated tale about a hit man, Clint (Pedro Pascal), who tries to retire, assuring his pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez) that his fist of fury is now 'just a hand.' Pascal goes about it sincerely, but the mini-tale is so grim that it only accomplishes two things: getting Pascal on the poster, and totally scrambling the movie's tone. Otherwise, these interconnected plots are rousing pulp fictions — the Quentin Tarantino film is an obvious inspiration. Characters criss-cross each other's paths in ways that are cute but don't aspire to cosmic coincidence beyond Pascal's Clint advising two punks, Tina and Lucid (Ji-young Yoo and Jack Champion), the most vulnerable place to aim a spiked bracelet. Tina and Lucid's segment is the opener and establishes that we're in for chipper stories of success (with as much blood as possible). It's inspired by a real-life showdown between the hardcore collective 924 Gilman Street, an all-ages music venue that's still head-banging, and a group of racist rednecks. We're hurled into the atmosphere with a great tracking shot down the club's sidewalk and into a concert where teens and 20-somethings are moshing so hard that the camera gets knocked down and stumbles back to its feet. Later, when Tina and Lucid kiss, we soar above the action as pogo-ing dancers blur into a lovely romantic swirl. The costume department must have used every safety pin in town. Still, these tough-looking kids abide by a principle of nonviolence — until they decide they're so sick of getting attacked by neo-Nazis that they're willing to fight back. There's geysers of gore and a skinhead who gets turned into a tiki torch. It's rousing stuff and a bit glib. The film refuses to dampen the mood: all cheers and no arrests, even with Ben Mendelsohn's loathsome police officer skulking around and harassing two Black girls, Entice and Barbie (Normani and Dominique Thorne), at the nearby ice cream shop where they work. In a smart detail, Mendelsohn's unnamed racist shoots the other white guy in the store a complicit wink. That man is wearing a Jesse Jackson for President hat, but he's too intimidated to step in. Entice and Barbie's section is the most realistic. It's also my favorite, with the duo challenging Too Short to a rap battle in which both sides take hilarious verbal aim at each other's genitals. (When the music kicks in, you might recognize Entice and Barbie from the Too Short track 'Don't Fight the Feelin',' in which the actual girls, just 15 at the time, took down the more established artist with both barrels.) Normani and Thorne nail the performance, spitting the tight, overlapping insults about Too Short's height, girth and dental hygiene with malicious glee. Meanwhile on Floyd's ads for Psytopics, green light beams from a believer's eyeballs and goes on to light up all corners of the movie. Minty lightning bolts zap down in moments of tension. Pea-soup hues leak out of Entice's microphone, the Oakland Coliseum and yes, that spiked bracelet. The green glow seems to imbue people with extra courage — or cause bloody noses. And it's never acknowledged by the script. It's for debate what it means. Over the course of the film, my guesses included telekinesis and algae blooms wafting from Lake Merritt. But the mystery adds to the sense that even though Boden and Fleck are pivoting away from Marvel and back to their indie roots, they've made a superhero movie, after all: a street-smart update on the Toxic Avenger. Either way, they've done their research. The soundtrack of Evelyn 'Champagne' King and Public Image Ltd. and modern punk acts reworking the classics is fantastic, as is the proper score by Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné! Every frame is filled with details, down to the T-shirts for small regional bands like Sewer Trout. There's even a reference to rocky road ice cream, invented in Oakland in 1929. So these 'Freaky Tales' are fun, if not quite satisfying. You get why so many Bay Area-born stars agreed to pop into the film for a scene, from the real Too Short and Sleepy Floyd to other locals including Marshawn Lynch as a bus driver, Rancid's Tim Armstrong as a Psytopics devotee and Angus Cloud in one of his last roles as a criminal thug. The biggest coup is a cameo from Concord native Tom Hanks, already kind of famous at the time even if none of the other characters remember his name. ('Big' would come out the following year.) What they do know about Hanks is that he used to sell hotdogs at the Oakland A's ballpark. Here, he plays a garrulous video-store clerk named Hank who challenges customers to name the best movies about underdogs. 'The underdog believes we can achieve the impossible,' Hanks says with a grin. This film does it too, in bold neon, for a quick and cheap smile.
Wall Street Journal
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Freaky Tales' Review: In the Footsteps of ‘Pulp Fiction'
The feature-length anthology 'Freaky Tales' is joyfully anchored in a specific time and place: It's 1987 Oakland, Calif., where we're told there's a cosmic green glow that infuses everything with a mystical power. There is indeed a recognizable vibe to the film, but it is derived from a somewhat more mundane force: the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who made soulful indies ('Half Nelson,' 'It's Kind of a Funny Story') before they took a detour into franchise filmmaking with the billion-dollar earner 'Captain Marvel,' have returned to their roots after a six-year absence from cinemas. They serve as both writers and directors of this 'Pulp Fiction'-style four-chapter tale that finally coheres with a thumper of a final act that is awash in righteous gore served up with an arch sensibility. That conclusion both supplies an alternative fantasy ending to a highly publicized real-life occurrence (à la 'Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood') and centers on a vengeance-minded figure with an East Asian outlook dispatching baddies with a sword while wearing a snazzy tracksuit like the Bride in 'Kill Bill.' Mr. Fleck (who grew up in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley) and Ms. Boden might have been credited with some inventiveness if they had dug up a more obscure artist to whom to pay homage, but given Mr. Tarantino's status as perhaps the single most imitated filmmaker of his generation, 'Freaky Tales' can hardly avoid being stamped as derivative. Which is not to say it isn't fun, at least intermittently. Did you know the guy who was in 'Splash' used to sell hot dogs at Oakland A's games? Characters keep bringing this up, sometimes referring to the actor in question as the guy from 'Bachelor Party' or 'The Money Pit.' Though these are perhaps not the three projects he is today most proud of, Tom Hanks is ever the good sport, and obligingly appears in the film. He plays Hank, the impressively, and annoyingly, well-informed owner of a video store. From the checkout counter he slings unsolicited film commentary along with VHS rentals (and is hence yet another reminder of Mr. Tarantino, famously a chatty video-store clerk around the same time). Mr. Hanks joins a sprawling cast of characters who wander in and out of each other's stories in the four chapters, which strike different tones as if alluding to different types of '80s movies. In the first, a multicultural group of youngsters led by Tina (Ji-young Yoo) and Lucid (Jack Champion) who dance at the Berkeley punk club 924 Gilman Street take up arms against a gang of skinhead thugs who have been terrorizing them. In chapter two, a pair of aspiring hip-hop singers, Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), are invited to perform at a club where they get into a comical rap battle with an established, real-life master of the form, Too Short (DeMario Symba Driver). The artist, an early avatar of West Coast hip-hop, also narrates the film and has a cameo as a cop; his 1987 track 'Freaky Tales' gave the movie its title. In the third section, a disillusioned loan-shark enforcer, Clint (Pedro Pascal), tries to exit the game after losing his pregnant wife. In the climactic fourth act, the corrupt cop (Ben Mendelsohn) for whom Clint works organizes a string of robberies at the homes of Golden State Warriors players while they're participating in a playoff game against the Los Angeles Lakers. Stretching across all of the segments is much excited discussion of 'Psytopics,' a New Age psychological inquiry, or self-improvement method, or cult that sounds a bit woo-woo in the California way but turns out to be highly useful in a crisis. One of its practitioners is the movie's hero, real-life basketball star Eric 'Sleepy' Floyd (Jay Ellis), who has a record-setting night on the court and (at least in the movie) an even more memorable one away from it. That over-the-top climax, despite its borrowed elements, partially redeems 'Freaky Tales,' which until then follows a zigzag path that is paved with clichés. Unlike Mr. Tarantino, who has few peers when it comes to dialogue and characterization, Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden fail to keep the narrative energy consistently high. Still, with its love for trashy genre conventions and its referential humor ('The Shining' and 'Scanners' are among the non-Tarantino features that earn an amusing shout-out), 'Freaky Tales' contains a bit more mojo than the average indie.
