Oakland and Berkeley real stars of fantastical ’80s period piece
I’m not sure how well Freaky Tales will play in middle America, but for those of us who live or grew up in the Oakland area–especially in the late 1980s–the movie is like our own personal valentine. Weird, wild, and more than a little crazy, the Oakland and Berkeley-set film is a rousing ode to Mayor Lionel Wilson’s Oakland, with its attendant complex mix of charm, edge, creativity, and simmering racism and misogyny.
Writing/directing duo Anna Boden and Berkeley born and bred Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson; Sugar) join the likes of Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You), Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station), and Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal (Blindspotting) in presenting an authentic look at the East Bay on screen. If you take the raw energy of those films and ratchet it up to about 10,000, you’ll have a sense of what Boden and Fleck are doing in Freaky Tales. The film is a psychedelic fever dream of 1980s nostalgia, with a killer soundtrack and Tarantino-esque levels of over-the-top violence.
Composed of four interconnected, individually named chapters, Freaky Tales is narrated by Oakland rapper Too Short (the film also shares its title with his 1987 track of the same name). The first chapter, titled “Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back” opens with characters exiting Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater after watching The Lost Boys, and instantly we know we’re in for something fun. This episode involves a based in reality showdown between patrons of Berkeley’s famed 924 Gilman and a group of neo-Nazis, all of whom look remarkably like Elias Koteas’s Duncan from John Hughes’s Some Kind of Wonderful.
That nod to the ubiquitous 1980s director is just one of many winks Freaky Tales makes to Gen X music and culture. Keep your eye out for an especially brilliant cameo by one of Oakland’s most famous residents, whose 1980s film titles get bandied about by several characters, in a particularly amusing meta bit that will delight cinephiles and Oaklanders alike.
Such Oakland and Berkeley references are liberally sprinkled throughout, and catching them is half the fun, so I won’t spoil them all here. But if the names Loard’s, Giant Burger, La Peña or Skyline mean anything to you, you’ll be beyond tickled.
The remaining chapters follow a female rap duo (Normani and Dominique Thorne), a crime enforcer and expectant father (Pedro Pascal), a corrupt, racist cop (Ben Mendelsohn), and Warriors all-star Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis), whose record-setting game four of the 1987 Warriors-Lakers semi-finals figures into the movie’s loose plot. How all the threads from each chapter finally intersect makes for an especially satisfying ending, even as the film’s absurdist, new-agey, mind-bending throughline demands an absolute suspension of disbelief.
Boden and Fleck also throw in several animated segments, adding to the picture’s heightened, comic book feel. Squeamish viewers should note that that sensibility includes a few scenes of extreme horror-movie level gore. But this genre mish-mash fits well with the film’s magical realism elements. The filmmakers can be forgiven for wanting to tap into a B-movie vibe, however: the joy and love they have for a specific time and place is riotous, infectious, and thrilling.
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Freaky Tales is now playing in theaters, including at the Grand Lake and Regal Jack London in Oakland, the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville, the AMC Metreon in San Francisco, and the Cinemark Century in Walnut Creek.
