‘Freaky Tales’: Ska Punks and Neo-Nazis Clash in Messy Sundance Movie

Following their 2019 superhero blockbuster Captain Marvel and ensuing prestige-TV efforts Mrs. America and Masters of the Sky, writers/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck go back to their roots with Freaky Tales, a nostalgia-drenched saga that’s steeped in Fleck’s childhood memories of growing up in the Bay Area in the late ’80s, and which serves as the opening night selection of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where they initially got their start. On the basis of the duo’s latest, however, you can’t go home again—or, at least, you can cut-and-paste all your adolescent obsessions into a giant collage (and recruit Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn to participate in the madness), but that doesn’t mean it’ll amount to more than a messy, insubstantial grab bag of your favorite things.

A film about underdogs that doesn’t wear its influences on its sleeve so much as scream them in your face, Freaky Tales opens with VHS static, warbling music, old-school computer graphics and a classic video game introduction that establishes 1987 Oakland as a place with “electricity in the air.” It’s additionally reigning down from the sky via lightning bolts and coming out of some individuals’ eyes courtesy of Golden State Warriors guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis), who when not playing the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Playoffs is running the Psytopics Learning Center, where he’s teaching men and women to harness “cosmic life force” and use their minds to vanquish internal and external enemies. Imagining Floyd as a quasi-supernatural guru is merely the first of numerous instances in which Boden and Fleck swirl fact and fantasy, although as quickly becomes apparent, there’s nothing especially inventive about how they combine their disparate ingredients.

Split into four chapters that eventually crisscross in ways that don’t suggest Robert Altman so much as any number of ’90s-era Tarantino counterfeits, Freaky Tales commences with a clash between ska punks and neo-Nazis at a music club not far from the Grand Lake Theatre, where Tina (Ji-Young Yoo) and Lucid (Jack Champion) have just seen The Lost Boys. Tina and Lucid are injured in this melee and, afterwards, they and the other members of their close-knit community decide that they must fight back against these ruthless hatemongers. Thus, channeling the spirit of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (which will subsequently be referenced again), they fashion homemade weapons and wage war against their white-nationalist adversaries in a street clash that’s marked by copious bloodshed and the same type of line-drawing cartoon embellishments (“Boom!”) that were previously employed to illustrate Tina and Lucid’s dreams and feelings for each other.

Read more at The Daily Beast.