Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Freaky Tales” is another hit of nostalgia porn for uncertain times: a shout out to Oakland’s underground culture in 1987 with folks like Too $hort and Sleepy Floyd as supporting characters. Boden and Fleck link Oakland nostalgia to a broader cultural yearning for, well, culture; for a sense of community driven by socializing in physical spaces like punk dens and clubs for rap battles and video stores for nerds looking to wax on the finer points of, say, underdog movies.
My understanding of Oakland in the 1980s is limited, though millennials and Gen X’ers with any interest in the pop culture of the last 40 years will be able to get on Boden and Fleck’s wavelength. Their nostalgia for handmade-feeling movies, videotapes, mix tapes, gaudy bracelets, diners, kung-fu movies, beat-up posters on club walls, Metallica and its rock brethren, “Repo Man,” anthology movies like “Creepshow” and “Pulp Fiction”—drives much contemporary art, created by artists who feel adrift in our era of impersonal media and weaponized estrangement.
Boden and Fleck manage to inject Tarantino-land with a shot of civic-minded earnestness and get out alive. Given how many filmmakers have embarrassed themselves over the years trying to out-Mack Q.T., this is an impressive accomplishment. “Freaky Tales” is a blast of genre mayhem that mashes extravagant violence with cheeky comedy and sentimentality. Be sure: It’s a wildly derivative mix tape, but I’m inclined to cut some slack for a picture staged with this much joy and energy.
The filmmakers spin interlocking stories, a la “Pulp Fiction,” with a sly note of parody. Set over a day or two in Oakland, on a weekend that branches out from patrons spilling out of a theater showing “The Lost Boys,” “Freaky Tales” concerns punks versus Nazis, female rapper underdogs versus a rising legend of the form, a thumb-breaker on that all-fabled “final job,” and the reveal that Sleepy Floyd is actually an ass kicker in the vein of Bruce Lee, Kareem, Blade, and the Bride. When Jay Ellis, as Floyd, slides various instruments of torture and destruction into his leather outfit as Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” rages… well, I might be a critic, but I’m not made of stone.
Boden and Fleck pull a canny trick time and again throughout this movie: they lead you to believe that you are watching a sermon about the evils of racism and sexism and unhinged white cops, which you are, only to crank the volume and deliver lurid escapist fantasias that are up to the standards of connoisseurs of gore and hard action. The punks-versus-Nazis thread, for instance, comes on like a poignant story of a blossoming interracial relationship between two punk-minded teens—which it is. But when it’s time to put the pedal to the metal, they reduce the baddies to geysers of blood in a stylized comic bloodbath that brings to mind Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s “Sin City.”
This misdirection is akin to being told to anticipate vegetables only to be served chocolate cake. It’s a shrewd and satisfying move that allows the medicine to go down easier. Boden and Fleck are known for earnest indies like “Half Nelson” and “Sugar” as well as for, inexplicably, “Captain Marvel.” With “Freaky Tales,” they seem to have united the most promising elements of these various projects. There’s slickness to their work here that suggests the tutelage gleaned from working for a studio monolith, which broadens the reach of their concerns with community. This is the kind of movie that breaks a revenge story for a riff in a mom-and-pop video store, which is amusing in its own right while reminding audiences of the joy of trading opinions somewhere other than an anonymous message board.
“Freaky Tales” shows what can be lost, then, when Nazis, on an upswing again with the modern right, rampage the neighborhood. More social engagement is necessary. Here, that includes proficiency with guns and samurai swords.
More nostalgia this week with Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard’s “Hell of a Summer.” The movie struts like the 50th coming of “Friday the 13th,” with counselors at a summer camp being dispatched by a masked killer the week before the campers arrive. Why do these movies avoid the arrival of the campers? Wouldn’t they be an intriguing wild card? I guess children are taboo even for Jason Voorhees and his disciples.
Anyway, “Hell of a Summer” is not as enthralled with Jason and his mythology as its opening suggests. The setting is right on—cabins near a lake in a woodsy area—but the tone is more suggestive of something like “Club Dread” or “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil:” not quite parodic, but facetious and knowing. Blends of horror and comedy are difficult to bring off without one ingredient offsetting the other, and “Hell of a Summer” is no exception, but Bryk and Wolfhard sustain your goodwill. The movie has a larkish quality that’s refreshing given the slickness of so many modern slasher movies.
A dweeby counselor named, ahem, Jason (Fred Hechinger), is an arrested case who can’t bear to leave the camp behind for a real job. He is looked at with disdain or pity by the other counselors, two of which are played by the filmmakers, and is divided from them when a murder spree erupts. There’s a promising thread of jokes nestled in here that Bryk and Wolfhard don’t do enough with: these modern young adults, with their modern sense of political correctness, don’t mesh with the plotting of a ‘80s movie. For instance, a dude who positions himself as an iconoclastic rebel out of an old horror movie gets off on using his allergies as a passive-aggressive weapon.
It would’ve been funny to see these characters maintaining their modern pretenses while a boogeyman forces them to wrestle with more, um, primordial concerns. Bryck and Wolfhard’s tossed-off approach doesn’t allow for such ferocious concentration. The draw here is the vintage-slasher atmosphere and the performances by an overqualified cast. Hechinger plays a conscious stereotype with unexpected poignancy, while the timing of the other cast members—including Abby Quinn, D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Pardis Saremi, Rosebud Baker, Matthew Finlan, Krista Nazaire, Daniel Gravelle, and Julia Lalonde—is impeccable. “Hell of a Summer” is suitable midnight-with-popcorn-in-July-viewing, which is how many of us first encountered Jason to begin with.
I am compelled to mention the [90-minute] finale of HBO’s third season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s watercooler phenom about a Four Seasons-type hotel and the murder one of them inevitably hosts every few years. We are in Thailand this year, with a trio of privileged aging white dudes—Jason Isaacs, Walton Goggins and Jon Gries—and the families they are holding captive with their ennui. There are also a trio of privileged white women—Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, and [Richmond-raised] Leslie Bibb—whom White has sketched in more resourcefully than he has the dudes. There are Russian criminals, a doofus Thai guard, and a returning “White Lotus” alum, Belinda (Natasha Rothwell).
The prominent word is that White has been spinning his wheels this season and I’m hard-pressed to disagree, especially after last week’s episode. Characters drawn in sitcom dimensions do not benefit from a languorous pace, especially since White has grown so allergic to providing detail. Isaacs is facing a legal meltdown due to some kind of embezzling scheme. Did he put his neck out for a friend, which is implied, or is he just a run-of-the-mill scumbag? The distinction might matter in terms of audience interest, as he’s been in a blackout-drunk [and Valium] torpor for seven hours of television time.
The first two seasons had a sense of drive, while this season finds these characters chewing their one designated issue incessantly, which, in the case of the three aging white dudes, is essentially the same issue. The ballyhooed Sam Rockwell cameo from a few weeks back stood out for actually having an emotional current. Rockwell played a monologue, concerned with the annihilating properties of addiction, almost as absurdist comedy, and the push-and-pull between tragedy and humor was extraordinary. And Goggins, listening to Rockwell, is more arresting than he’s been the rest of the season.
Still, White does this sort of soapy murder-mystery better than most anyone else in the game. The horny humidity of the setting is palpable, and White remains skilled in thrusting lesser-known actors against pros. Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea is a sexy flake who would’ve made Shelly Duvall proud, and Gries, also borrowed from last season, conjures an aura of elegant menace that’s new to this character actor’s body of work. This season has spun a web of strangely addictive boringness that’s not unlike hours spent, well, baking on a beach. I remain eager to see whodunnit to whom.
“Freaky Tales” and “Hell of a Summer” are now in theaters. “The White Lotus” is streaming on Max, with the season finale airing this Sunday, April 6 at nine.
