It’s 1987 in Oakland, California. The Golden State Warriors are trying to avoid being swept by the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, feuding factions of the city’s youth culture are at each other’s throats, and Ryan Fleck (one half of the directing team behind Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind, along with his longtime collaborator Anna Boden) is a 10-year-old Bay Area resident taking it all in. Or maybe it’s a decade later actually, and it’s 1997: video store culture is at its apex and, in the aftermath of Pulp Fiction’s crossover success, the market is flooded with discursive, pop-culture obsessed genre films and Fleck (now studying film at NYU) is mainlining violent, cynically-made dross like 2 Days in the Valley and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, eagerly awaiting a new Tarantino film like everyone else. Fleck and Boden’s new film Freaky Tales, which is finally being released after premiering back at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, would have you believe it’s deriving inspiration from the former, but watching the film, it’s self-evident that its real influence is the latter. The film, an anthology built around four loosely connected urban legends, amounts to little more than the sum total of its references; a not-so-secret handshake with film geeks that can barely conceal how impressed it is with itself. The experience is akin to being lectured by a video store clerk who can rattle off endless film factoids but lacks the self-awareness to recognize they’re boring you. As if to underline this point, the film casts one of the biggest movie stars in the world — himself a former Oakland resident — for a one-scene cameo to act out this very scenario.
After a credit crawl narrated by rapper and local legend Too $hort, which explains that the entire Bay Area has been afflicted by an unexplained green glow which is allegedly having a strange effect on its residents, we’re introduced to pierced, leather-wearing punk Lucid (Jack Champion) and the unrequited object of his affection, Tina (Ji-young Yoo), exiting The Lost Boys (as an aside, Freaky Tales is notably set in the spring of ‘87 and that particular film didn’t open until late summer, but if we start going down the CinemaSins road, we really will be here all day). Before they can get more than a few minutes into debating the finer points of the vampire film’s plot, they’re harassed by a group of neo-Nazis joyriding through town in a pickup truck. The underground punk scene is shown to be perpetually at war with the Nazis; skinheads routinely storm the local rock club and, unprovoked, whale on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the building. Tired of getting their asses kicked and refusing to call the cops — although set in the late ’80s, the ACAB is strong with this one — a small army of punks decide to tool up with bike chains and box cutters and stand their ground; violently fighting back against the Nazis, and with Lucid and Tina finally acknowledging their feelings for one another amidst the broken bones and blood spray.
Simultaneously, up-and-coming hip-hop artists Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (R&B artist Normani) are invited to perform at a rap battle opposite the aforementioned Too $hort. Fearing that they’re being set up to be publicly humiliated in front of a hostile audience that’s not receptive toward female artists, the two women have to be quick on their feet if they’re going to survive the crucible of spitting rhymes against a more experienced rapper. The film’s third chapter, meanwhile, stars Pedro Pascal as Clint, an enforcer for a loan shark doing the proverbial “one last job” before retiring; putting his criminal associations behind him to spend time with his very pregnant wife and, soon, their newborn daughter. But after someone from Clint’s past takes a shot at him, instead killing his wife and gravely injuring his unborn child, Clint professes he has nothing left to live for and pledges to take a flame to the entire corrupt system he used to be a part of. And finally — and surely the “freakiest” tale of the bunch — we get “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd.” Detailing the rather incredulous events of May 10, 1987, when real-life NBA All-Star Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis) scored a still record-breaking 29 points in the fourth quarter to stave off the Lakers while, at the same time a group of white nationalist criminals (led by Ben Mendelsohn’s racist police detective and the late actor Angus Cloud) planned to rob the home of every Golden State player during the game. When Floyd’s girlfriend is murdered after returning home early and confronting two of the thieves, Sleepy opens up his vault filled with antique Asian weapons to exact bloody vengeance on those who have wronged him.
The entire Floyd storyline — which, at nearly 40 minutes, is the longest of the four chapters — is indicative of the film’s overall approach, as well as what’s so irritating about it. Needless to say, Floyd is a real person — still living in fact; he also has a cameo in the film — and the events of his life can be easily Googled. This includes whether his home was burglarized as part of a single-night spree that affected the entire team (if so, then it wasn’t widely reported), was his girlfriend was murdered in his home (nope), and was he in turn a suspect in a kill-crazy rampage with katana blades and throwing knives (come on now, what do you think?). And yet, here we are watching someone who was still playing in the NBA during the second Clinton administration, riding his motorcycle through the night, trench coat flapping in the wind with a couple swords strapped to his back, lopping off heads and limbs and using his transcendental meditation powers (give me a break…) to explode people’s skulls. But then, in truth, you don’t expend this much energy talking around Cronenberg’s Scanners within the film without replicating its most notorious moment. Freaky Tales isn’t encumbered by stodgy notions of realism; its narrator can wave away such concerns by saying that’s how they heard the story and hope the film’s juvenile notions of what’s “cool” or “edgy” are enough to carry the day. It’s all violent wish fulfillment, uncomplicated by nuance, constraints, or notions of morality. So if the idea alone of watching the white power structure getting stomped on accompanied by goopy squib effects and allusions to Repo Man is enough to satiate oneself, then buy your ticket now. But what of the rest of us?
Freaky Tales also commits the cardinal sin of anthology films, which is that none of the short stories contained within it actually work independently of the omnibus format. There’s a noticeable lack of plot complications or memorable scenes in a given chapter, even at roughly 25 minutes a pop. In particular, the Barbie and Entice segment feels like a well-intentioned thought-starter meant to incorporate Oakland’s hip hop community or afford a female perspective to the film that was never actually fleshed out (two women winning a rap battle in a nightclub doesn’t exactly live up to the film’s title either). Having said that, it’s not as if the film is a series of disparate puzzle pieces that only reveals its true shape when taken as a whole. Its narrative threads are largely self-contained, save for some of the characters strolling through the background of other stories. The film traffics exclusively in archetypes and tropes — best friends unwittingly in love with one another; the reluctant enforcer who’s tired of breaking fingers; the mysterious powerbroker hiding in plain sight — which, along with the wall-to-wall movie references, saps the film of any real sense of specificity. As if to compensate, the filmmakers adorn the slim text with inane formalist gimmicks; employing multiple aspect ratios, numerous kinds of animation, interlacing effects to create the impression of watching an old VHS cassette in addition to cigarette burns meant to signal reel changes in a movie theater (the expression “pick a lane” jumps to mind). It all adds up to something which is desperately trying to will itself into an item of cult-like devotion; a misunderstood totem of the very sort discussed at length within the film, that can be passed around by breathless acolytes for generations to come. Yet like all the earlier Tarantino knock-offs, most of which have disappeared into the void without brick-and-mortar video stores around to propagate them, Freaky Tales is at best a pale imitation of something singular.
DIRECTOR: Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden; CAST: Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Normani, Jay Ellis, Jack Champion; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: April 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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