Freaky Tales

 You had to be there, man.

 The very specific there in discussion is Oakland, California, and the when is 1987, on the night where basketball player Sleepy Floyd set some sort of basketball record. That game really happened; Everything else is a fable about rallying together, saying enough is enough, making amends... and getting even. Always aided by a mysterious green energy that threads four interconnected stories.

 The first tale is a straightforward public service announcement that it is always ok to punch (and slash, and stab, etc) nazis as a bunch of punks decide to band together to protect themselves against the marauding gang of skinheads that has taken to bullying them. The second one is about two young women (Normani and Dominique Thorne) who go on a rap battle against Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver), overcoming insecurities and the prevalent misogyny in both their lives and in the music they enjoy.

 A mob enforcer (Pedro Pascal) tries to make sense of his life after a family tragedy in the more contemplative third entry, while Sleepy Floyd himself (played by Jay Ellis) steps in to wrap things up with a blood-soaked revenge story that has extremely satisfying nods to both martial arts movies and Scanners.

 The narrative and thematic threads that bind the stories could have been developed better, but the way a couple of the developments are brought back (including a certain someone's habit of stalking people) made me laugh appreciatively. The structure clearly owes a lot to Quentin Tarantino.

 Freaky Tales is a willfully ridiculous confection played mostly straight - a simple, crowd-pleasing exercise in nostalgia, wish fulfilment and myth-making that's just strange and playful enough to give it a tiny bit of heft. If I have to be honest, I was unsure about it for a while - but it slowly, steadily won me over.
 That is, I suspect, mostly down to the writing/directing team of Anna Bowden and Ryan Fleck. They fill their version of that night with specificity, making what could just have been empty nostalgia feel personal and lived-in, and give their characters enough depth to make it worth getting invested in them. In any other hands, it all might have felt cynical, but Boden and Fleck imbue the whole project in a sort of well-natured, joyful yearning that I eventually found irresistible. How could I be down on a movie where a crowd of kids celebrate a bloody success with a Black Flag concert?

 The acting is excellent across the board (Ben Mendelsohn puts in an appropriately despicable appearance as the main antagonist), the grainy cinematography (by Jac Fitzgerald) is often gorgeous, and the action, when things get serious, is surprisingly good (the film has two major action scenes - the first one is definitely not serious, the second one is... well, it isn't serious either, but it is a joy to watch).

 What a strange movie. I don't think it's anywhere near as good as any of Boden and Fleck's previous films*, but it's a cool little oddity with a power all its own. It might be pure calories, but sometimes that's exactly what you need.

 

 *: I'm not going to count their Marvel entry.