Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance this year with a pretty delightful, action-packed romp through late-80s Oakland, Freaky Tales. The film takes its name from a rap by Oakland legend Too $hort, who serves as our narrator and also has a brief cameo. (Keep an eye out for Marshawn Lynch, Sleepy Floyd, Tim Armstong and that guy from The Money Pit.) Though Oakland’s rap scene does play a role here, the film’s four chapters intertwine storylines traveling through the diverse socio-cultural landscape of the city at the time, which, as one cast member noted after the premiere, has been severely disrupted in recent years by gentrification. To that point, Freaky Tales’ nostalgia doesn’t overly fetishize fashion or music or objects, though all of these contribute to a more or less authentic feel. Rather, the film is interested in a lost and obviously beloved community. It’s interested in the ways in which, particularly perhaps from Fleck’s perspective, a sector of young Oakland at that time shared a dogged resistance to forces that wanted to crush and humiliate it.
The underdog is a central metaphor in Freaky Tales, and nothing characterizes this state-of-being better than the event that frames the whole film: Game Four of the Western Conference Semifinals, featuring the Golden State Warriors (remember, they used to play in Oakland?) and the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers. On May 10 that year, the Warriors were down 3-0 in the series, but, as we’re reminded early on in Freaky Tales, Golden State point guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd scored 51 points in Game 4 to ruin a Lakers series sweep. Something was in the air that night, Too $hort tells us, signified by a weird green light that appears in a variety of forms throughout the film.
Before we get to the full implications of this seemingly supernatural event, however, Fleck and Boden lead us through some preliminaries, including an epic battle for existence between the denizens of a punk club fighting a band of neo-Nazis, and two young women, the rap duo Danger Zone, braving their fears to take the stage and battle a local idol. These first two chapters are certainly entertaining, wild and gory, but they do feel a bit light, even predictable, as we begin to wonder when the love, friendship and heroics we’re seeing will meet up with some true challenges, giving the whole project more substance.
Chapter 3, the longest to this point and featuring an engaging Pedro Pascal, delivers both tragedy and even greater stakes as some of the Tarantino-like path-crossing we’ve seen earlier begins to add up. The grand finale pushes Sleepy Floyd’s heroism to unimaginable heights, confirming the film’s central premise that its most generous and community-oriented figures, those who work to lift others up without regard for profit, will always come out on top. At least in fantasy.
More than an easy nostalgia trip, Freaky Tales is a pretty fun comic book, set in something like an alternative present, made, quite nicely, to look like the past. (The gore meter registers high, however, so be warned.) It doesn’t matter that many of the film’s moves are familiar. (There actually are some great surprises in the final chapter, and the use of animation throughout is both practical and clever.) Rather, Freaky Tales’ entertainment lies in its goofy and eager desire to expand on the joy of that one great night in the Coliseum, when the underdog knocked the bully cold, made the impossible possible. And even though the forces of darkness, with all their money and power, always seem to come back stronger to finish the job (and to take your team across the Bay), maybe that green glimmer of hope will be enough to encourage you to mount a resistance one more time.
