Freaky Tales (2024): High on Style, Inconsistent on Substance

The amount of 80s nostalgia there has been over the last ten years or so has meant that it’s harder and harder for films set in the decade stand out: regardless of quality, there’s nothing that stops them being seen as cynical bursts of nostalgia for a time gone by, a time that was far more politically and socially tumultuous than the memories of pastel colours and pop videos would have us believe. 

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Freaky Tales can be seen as an attempt to combine that aesthetic with social commentary: yes, we have many 80s references here and the generic visual sheen is applied, but here they serve less as characteristics of the film and more as points of comparison: Freaky Tales presents darker stories of racism, misogyny and far-right gang violence, with the 80s window dressing applied to it. Told in an anthology format with stories and characters that loosely interconnect over the course of the film, it’s a novel idea that is mostly entertaining but also comes with some observable issues. 

The first segment, Strength In Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back, and the last, The Legend of Sleepy Floyd, are both stylish and violent tales of revenge against a despicable mob of neo-Nazis. Strength in Numbers sees the regulars of a music venue go up against the group of vicious thugs, who the night before had stormed into the show and trashed the venue. Sleepy Floyd on the other hand is a John Wick-esque segment of an uber-cool basketball player whose house and family are attacked by the same group, and serves as a loose conclusion to the film’s themes and setting. 

I recently watched Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire for the first time and that film was definitely running through my mind as I watched Freaky Tales; this is the cool, trashy, stylish side of 80s cinema back with a vengeance, and that’s perfectly apparent in the fight scenes. They’re absolute bloodbaths with cartoony special effects and hammy acting. If they were trying to strike that specific chord of 80s nostalgia, then they succeeded spectacularly.

So the film is bookended by these two stories of bloodthirsty rebellion against right-wing shitheads. The second and third segments actually give us more meat to chew on. Don’t Fight The Feeling sees Dominique Thorne and Normani as Barbie and Entice, a budding rap duo who get invited on stage to battle with rapper Too Short, and are taken aback by the nasty misogyny in his lyrics. OK, the idea that early rap music was nothing but misogyny isn’t anything new and this film doesn’t really offer any new insight on it, but it’s an interesting set-piece nonetheless – an 8 Mile-esque rap battle plays out between these two girls and Too Short, with just a little sprinkle of sci-fi madness as a strange green energy lights up the room and also lifts a bus into the sky. 

The third segment, Born To Mack, will probably be the most talked about since it starts the entertainment industry’s favourite adopted father, our constant source of wholesome memes, and our new Reed Richards, the incredible Pedro Pascal. It’s easily the most emotionally-charged piece of the film, as Pascal plays a wannabe-retired criminal trying to settle down with his expecting wife, only to come into contact with a figure from his past out for revenge. Again, it’s hardly breaking new ground as a story but it’s still a good foundation and it makes for the most memorable of the four segments here. Pascal is his usual charismatic brilliance but I was really impressed by the small role of Natalia Dominguez as his wife, as she manages to bring a lot of warmth to her part even though she only has a few lines. 

I like all four of these segments individually, however we run into some issues when the film starts to try and connect them. 

All four are sent in Oakland, Oregon and mostly in the same span of time and, in some nice touches, characters from different stories interact with each other. A brief exchange in a diner in Strength in Numbers alerts us to the presence of Pedro Pascal but we then don’t see him again until his time to shine in Born To Mack. Similarly, Strength In Numbers starts with our characters walking out of a cinema and badmouthing a vehicle of Nazis driving by, briefly checking in on the two women who they harassed. The second segment starts at this same cinema, and we realise these two women are Barbie and Entice as we follow them struggling to cope with the racism and misogyny present in the town. These little bits of connective tissue were really nice and to be honest, I didn’t need much more than that. 

It’s where the connections are more overt that things get a little messy. Ben Mendelsohn (in his third collaboration with Boden and Fleck) plays a sleazy and condescending officer introduced in the second segment, who shows up at the ice cream parlour Barbie and Entice work at and is a horrible creep to them. He reappears in both of the later segments and it’s never quite clear who he’s in allegiance with. We similarly see Pascal’s character briefly in the last ten minutes, and it feels like we’re missing a chunk out from his story that connects his appearance here to his appearances beforehand. 

There’s also the aforementioned appearance of a magical green energy that shows up at least once in each of the four stories. It makes for a cool visual but it feels like a bit of an afterthought – it doesn’t contribute much to the overall narrative and we already have enough linkage between the segments without the need for it. 

It’s also about time to bring up the theme of 80’s nostalgia again. Freaky Tales doesn’t fall into as many traps as its contemporaries but there are still some appeals to nostalgia that are quite distracting. For instance, someone makes a reference to Splash (1984) early on, which at first you just dismiss as a trivial reference. Then in the third segment Pascal goes into a video store and who shows up? Tom Hanks, who (let’s face it) has been playing Tom Hanks for most of his work this century. We all love the guy, but his appearance here really took me out of the moment. 

I certainly had a lot of fun with Freaky Tales. It’s stylish, consistently entertaining and tells familiar stories in not so familiar ways. However, in trying to do so much Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have ended up biting off a bit more than they can chew. It’s certainly a better showcase of their talents than when they were wasted on Captain Marvel, one of the MCU’s more listless entries, but there’s a clash between what Freaky Tales can do and what it does do. Some elements are undercooked and needed more development, and the worldbuilding can be a bit scattershot. It’s definitely good, but it’s not freakishly good.

ALEX’S ARCHIVE – FREAKY TALES (2025)