Freaky Tales Is a Gaudy, Gory Tribute to Oakland and B-Movie Aesthetics

It’s nice to see a film mythologize a place that doesn’t necessarily possess the biggest stature in the pop cultural consciousness. After all, what does one really associate with the city of Oakland? It’s the town across the bay from San Francisco, naturally. It gets its share of Silicon Valley spillover. It recently lost its Major League Baseball team, the Athletics, in a bit of bitter fallout that will likely continue stinging residents for decades. But all in all, it’s not the sort of place that often earns a glow-up, which is one of the things that immediately makes Freaky Tales stand out. This oddball fusion of disparate genre elements and ‘80s pop-cultural ephemera is now one of the first things I’ll think of when I hear the city’s name, thanks to its sincere adoration for a blemished but vibrant burg at a time that was clearly formative for directors Anna Boden and Ryan K. Fleck–and clearly a hell of a lot more personal than anything in their 2019 big-budget launchpad, Captain Marvel.

That time, specifically, is the summer of 1987, a moment when there just seemed to be “something in the air” for residents of the Californian city. A green, glowing something, according to Freaky Tales, which stakes its claim in fantastical alternate history through the idea that some kind of cosmic disturbance in 1987 Oakland was inspiring grand moments of life, death, carnage and endurance throughout the city as it touched its residents. Or as the opening moments of the film put it: “Everybody in town had a theory about where this cosmic green shit came from.”

We never find out, if you were wondering, but that knowledge in no way matters–all that is important to know about Freaky Tales is that it’s essentially an anthology (albeit a loose one), a sequence of four interconnected tales exploring various sides of the Oakland experience in 1987 for various subcultures, aspiring strivers, and people at the end of their ropes. It flirts with many genres–Tarantinoesque crime drama, action comedy, hip-hop musical, coming-of-age love story–while demonstrating a consistent warmth toward its subjects and their oddly uplifting stories, many of which are ultimately tales of triumph. That, and it features maybe the best full body explosion put on film since Brian De Palm’s The Fury in 1978, which is not something I can claim I was expecting to see when I hit the play button of my screener. If you take nothing else away from this review, know that there’s a guy who gets blown up in incredibly gory and satisfying fashion.

In terms of structure, many will likely compare the criminal underbelly elements of Freaky Tales to some kind of Pulp Fiction riff, but the lightly interconnected nature of the stories–which jump forward and backward through time–more closely recall another “simultaneous” anthology in the form of Michael Dougherty’s now iconic Halloween classic Trick ‘r Treat. As in that film, we see the majority of each story one at a time, but each story also contains sequences that revisit previous material to cross over with the others, giving greater significance and context to prior events. This all has a carefree, fast-moving looseness to it, and little is being taken seriously; a choice augmented by silly visual flourishes throughout, such as the squiggly animated drawings that pop up from time to time, illustrating what characters are discussing or thinking about. There’s a joyously free-wheeling sense to the film’s visual identity, which is sprinkled with elements that are both subtle (digital cue marks to evoke 35mm film) and enjoyably ostentatious. It doesn’t all work spectacularly–some of the digital blood effects are particularly uncanny and weird looking, ending up like gouts of blood from a 16-bit Mortal Kombat title–but it’s easy to see what the filmmakers and cinematographer Jac Fitzgerald were going for. Freaky Tales drips with the aesthetics of its inspirations, but it’s also so varied that nothing has a chance to feel stale.