Freaky Tales (now streaming on HBO Max) has all the ingredients of, well, a mess. But a fascinating one, at least. First off, it’s a project by writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who famously jumped from acclaimed indie films like Half Nelson and Sugar to earning Disney/Marvel $1 billion at the box office after making Captain Marvel; Freaky Tales is their long-awaited follow-up to that megahit. That follow-up is an anthology film (you don’t see those every day) functioning as a love letter to 1980s Oakland and starring everyone from Pedro Pascal (who’s been in four films released in 2025, as well as HBO series The Last of Us) to Dominique Thorne (Marvel series Ironheart) to Jay Ellis (playing a fictional riff on real-life basketball hero Sleepy Floyd) to Tom Hanks (don’t get too excited – it’s a cameo). And it went absolutely nowhere, debuting at Sundance 2024, barely being released in theaters and now turning up in your streaming menus like a star-studded, weirdly overlooked curiosity. Now let’s see what’s up with this oddball thing.
The Gist: The first thing you’ll notice is the grainy VHS effect that, as they used to say, is not the fault of your TV set. An opening voiceover and crawl explains how a strange neon-green glowing electric phenomenon (from outer space? No one knows!) appeared in Oakland in 1987, sometimes manifesting as lightning or lights in people’s eyes. Local Golden State Warriors basketball star Sleepy Floyd (Ellis) started a, well, what is it? A school? A cult? A movement? A philosophy? I guess that’s close enough. It’s a bit foggy how it works, but I think it involves recruiting people and teaching them things under the brand name Psytopics – there are TV commercials and bus ads and everything – and, as the fourth and final mini-movie of Tales more than heavily implies, it may result in some serious martial arts badassery.
And so we begin with the story of progressive punks vs. Neo-Nazi skinheads. The former just want to skank to aggro live music in their punk club, while being non-racist, non-homophobic, non-violent and all that. The latter routinely show up to kick their asses. Two of the punks are Lucid (Jack Champion) and Tina (Ji-young Yoo), a budding couple, who join their comrades in a pact to set aside the non-violent part of their credo and fight back against those jackbooted bald buttholes. Lucid even buys Tina a sweet gift – the pointiest, most razor-bladed punker wristband ever.
The second short finds some of the periphery-of-the-frame players from the first transforming into protags: Entice (Normani) and Barbie (Thorne) hang outside the movie theater fresh from seeing The Lost Boys when a local DJ/promoter guy approaches them. He saw them at an open mic night, performing as hip-hop duo Danger Zone, and now he wants them to join (a pre-platinum-selling) Too Short (DeMario Symba Driver) on stage. They’re thrilled – and it’s sure to be more fulfilling than their day job, scooping ice cream for sexist pigs at the local cone shop. And then they realize they’re being set up: They’re about to battle with one of the biggest and baddest rap stars in the Bay Area.
Part three: Pedro at last! He plays Clint, whose black leather jacket and arc of a scar under his eye IDs him as a heavy. He gets bad news: An “incident” left his pregnant wife dead and his baby daughter in the NICU. He has a big revolver in his glove box and we flash back 24 hours, when Clint left his with-child wife in the car to grab a movie from the video store – but also to bust the fingers of a sad sack who owes Clint’s boss money. Meanwhile, an intense looking fella seems to have been following Clint from the car to the street to the store and back to the car. And that fella has a gun, too.
And finally, the saga of Sleepy Floyd (Ellis). It’s game four against the Lakers and the Warriors are about to be swept right out of the playoffs and as Sleepy sets scoring records to keep his team alive – notably something that happened in real life, not just this movie – a couple of the Neo-Nazis from the first vignette bust into Sleepy’s house and end up putting bullets into Sleepy’s mom and girlfriend. The Nazis work for The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn), who happens to be Clint’s employer from short no. 3 and the sexual harasser from short no. 2. They wanted to get into Sleepy’s secret room, which is full of… well, swords and knives and shit. They may have just effed with the wrong basketball star-slash-new age guru.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The throwback anthology format is very V/H/S. The cut-up narrative structure is Pulp Fiction. The first short is Green Room meets The Warriors and the second is 8 Mile and the third is Coen Bros. (think Miller’s Crossing or Fargo) and the final-act slasheroo is Kill Bill-via-Bruce-Lee-in-Game of Death.
Performance Worth Watching: You’ll walk away from Freaky Tales hoping to see Normani and Thorne’s characters pursue their music career in their own feature.
Memorable Dialogue: Hanks’ name is on the poster so it’s not a spoiler to reveal his presence, but I won’t mention who he plays or where he turns up to say, rather hilariously, “I’m trying to provide you with an experience.”
Sex and Skin: A brief bit of oral sex.
Our Take: Here’s what holds Freaky Tales’ overlapping vignettes together: Fleck’s nostalgia for his youth in Oakland (Boden grew up in Massachusetts), ranging from his apparently favorite local landmarks (the Grand Lake Theatre movie house, most notably) to era-specific sporting events and music (cue the Operation Ivy, Too Short and Metallica needledrops). And that nostalgia is represented by the green electricity that manifests in the film’s collection of underdog protagonists, and functions as a mysterious and righteous power of goodness.
Beyond some instances of crass racism surely engineered to reflect that of the modern day – one character laments that we should be beyond that shit by now – the movie’s no more complex than that. It’s an exercise in flashy kitsch that’s modestly engaging, but never really finds its vitality unless you share the filmmakers’ intimate relationship with the Bay Area, its people, places and, for lack of a better word, aura.
This is an amusing-but-never-laugh-out-loud comedy with snatches of sci-fi and tonal and visual flourishes functioning as doting genre homages. It’s by turns entertaining and perplexing, never fully reaching a truly “freaky” level of style, despite copious splashes of blood and a couple of heavily engineered shock. There’s a moment in the punk club where the cinematographer falls down and gets back up, a hint that we shouldn’t take any of this too seriously. It’s a fun gimmick of a film, and not much more.
Our Call: Freaky Tales is guaranteed to be a cult favorite for a few but a headscratcher for most of us, but it’s endearingly far enough outside the norm to warrant a watch. Give it a shot and STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.