Film Review: FREAKY TALES (2024): Set in 1987, Four Stories Saturated in Craziness Make For a Unique and Wild Ride
Freaky Tales Review
Freaky Tales (2024) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck and starring Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Jay Ellis, Too $hort, Ji-young Yoo, Jack Champion, Normani, Dominique Thorne, Marteen, Tom Hanks, LeQuan Antonio Bennett, Michelle Farrah Huang, Keir Gilchrist, Dan Marotte, James Coker, Jordan Gomes and Marshawn Lynch.
Picture it. Oakland, CA, 1987. That’s what filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (It’s Kind of a Funny Story) want you to do, but most of the people who will enjoy their wild new film set during that year, Freaky Tales, would probably be better off to just let the directors do the picturing for them. I read countless articles on this movie and still couldn’t get an idea of what it was going to be like until I actually saw it. It’s clear the third story is the best one here out of four, though there are good ideas prominent all the way through. Surprisingly, this movie wasn’t made with a big budget, and it’s all the more authentic of a movie because of it. When I say “authentic,” I mean stylized and gritty which is what you want a movie like this to feel like from beginning to end.
This film opens with people coming out of a movie theater showing The Lost Boys, a vampire film which was released- that’s right- in 1987. One of them (a young Korean woman named Tina, played by Ji-young Yoo) has a lot of personality while the other, a guy named Lucid (Jack Champion), is a bit boring. Still, both performers are just charismatic enough as two of several club-goers who wouldn’t mind taking on some evil racist Nazis they encounter if the situation would so call for it and it does, eventually, in this movie.
A pretty great scene has Tina talking about her recent dream while she asks Lucid for more information on his latest dream which he doesn’t necessarily reveal truthfully. Yoo is very interesting as a performer and commands attention at all times during the brief screen time she has in the film.
This first tale, though, is basically, an excuse to use some brass knuckles Tina gets and it’s enjoyable enough as we move ahead to the second tale where two African-American girls (Dominique Thorne and Normani) punch cards for customers at an ice cream shop to help them get one free after said customers buy ten. As the second story becomes a rap-like face/off between the girls and Too $hort (the real-life Too $hort narrates the picture) on stage at a club, it’s highly enjoyable enough, but instantly forgettable.
Soon, Pedro Pascal comes into the action of the film as a guy named Clint who collects debts and goes to a video store which has a back end gambling table in the back of the porno section. Tom Hanks plays a video clerk who knows his movies and goes on to Clint about underdog stories such as Hoosiers and Rocky. Hanks is great in his turn in this picture and the film is worth seeing on the basis of his cameo alone here. It’s that enjoyable to watch.
Pascal, himself, has an edge in his performance that makes it totally watchable especially when his character undergoes a tremendous loss and must decide what he wants to do regarding a debt he, in fact, owes himself. Pascal and Hanks are two pros and their primary scene earlier in the video store is just about perfection. As Clint gets tickets to a sports game as a partial payment towards a debt after he takes a finger off, he ends up selling the tickets to a young kid in exchange for a mix tape in another hilarious scene.
There’s more. This movie also brings Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) into the mix, and heads may (literally) explode as the movie integrates different aspects of the previous three tales into the fourth and final freaky tale. Yep. Is the movie great? Nope. Is the movie fun? Yep. Does it keep your interest? Yep. Is it an instant classic? Nope. Could it be a classic one day? Yep. That’s my answer to a song prominently featured in the fourth tale which many of you will be able to tell the title of through my answers to those aforementioned questions.
I liked Freaky Tales overall. It’s unique and doesn’t even seem like it has any signature that Boden and Fleck made it. If you didn’t tell me they directed it, I would never have guessed who created it. That’s one of my often required stamps for a good movie. There are fake commercials and tracking problems straight out of a VHS tape in the static-like look of this film occasionally. This movie brings in video film hits of the year, too, as Pascal’s character names off movies like Ruthless People as films he’s trying to rent at one point. These tales within Boden and Fleck’s movie get freaky and the end credits even throw in a wild music video with the girls from the second tale. 1987 was also the year nobody saw Ishtar and this picture knows it!
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made Half Nelson, the movie that propelled Ryan Gosling to his first Oscar nomination. They went on to make a popular Marvel movie, but after seeing Freaky Tales, you’ll forget about that blockbuster and want to see something more in the vein of Freaky Tales as their next project. These directors are back on the map. Let’s hope they stay on course and make something just as unique next.
Rating: 7/10
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