Freaky Tales
“Freaky Tales uses a simplistic take on real-world issues that reaches for easy answers.”
Title: Freaky Tales (2024)
Directors: Anna Boden 👩🏼🇺🇸 and Ryan Fleck 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Anna Boden 👩🏼🇺🇸 and Ryan Fleck 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Weiting 👩🏻🇨🇳🇺🇸
—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 3/5
Following the commercial success of their superhero blockbuster Captain Marvel (2019), writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck join hands again with passion project Freaky Tales, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival. An instant crowd pleaser, this stylized hybrid of vintage animation and Tarantino-esque gore is an ode to 1980s Oakland and its vibrant punk, ska, and hip-hop subcultures.
Boden and Fleck break down their 1987-set film into four revenge vignettes led by a couple of young punk rockers fighting neo-Nazis and falling in love; a female rap duo battling sexist male rappers (and winning!); a retiring debt collector/bruiser struggling with a personal tragedy; and an NBA star seeking vigilante justice for his family.
The maximalist B-movie goes on an unhinged roller coaster, powered by an electrifying ensemble performance. The anthology is skillfully pieced together by editor Robert Komatsu's dazzling cross-cuts. But Boden and Fleck often take the easy route in their writing, with whiplash-inducing transitions and characters that lack persuasive backstories. The result is a campy thriller that offers plenty of entertainment, but it doesn’t live up to the potential of its stellar cast.
Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Among the four chapters, half of them champion women. It’s too bad, then, that the other half use the sensationalized deaths of wives and girlfriends as hollow vessels to channel their male partners' bloodthirsty outrage.
In the first chapter, “The Gilman Strikes Back,” the young rebel Tina is played by Korean American actor Ji-young Yoo, who gives an effortlessly cool, spiked-brass-knuckled performance. While her story develops into a coming-of-age romance with fellow partyer Lucid (Jack Champion), he takes on a supporting role, following Tina’s lead in their misfit community’s fight against the neo-Nazis in town. Their organic romance is rewarding to witness, and you can’t help but root for these underdogs in love.
In the second chapter, “Don't Fight the Feeling,” a dynamic duo of Black hip-hop artists Entice (Normani) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne) try to make a name for themselves in an industry that treats women as sex objects. This is a feel-good story where talented women triumph over their ignorant male peers and earn the professional respect they deserve—always a pleasure to watch. And Normani shines bright in her debut role while maintaining strong chemistry with Thorne.
But things start going sour in the next chapter, "Born to Mack." Tough guy Clint’s (Pedro Pascal) pregnant wife Grace (Natalia Dominguez) is shot and killed by an old enemy of his. Though Dominguez tries her best to bring tenderness and layers to the empty role, there’s only so far one can go when reduced to a Dead Wife trope. The final chapter, “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd,” ends the film’s representation of women on a whimper: NBA hotshot Sleepy Floyd’s (Jay Ellis) nameless, barely-there girlfriend gets murdered during a botched robbery, serving as the impetus for Sleepy Floyd to go on a killing spree.
Race: 4/5
Chilean American actor Pascal may be the film’s biggest name, with a vulnerable role as the bereaved Clint, but the overall cast is diverse, including Black and Korean American leads. Most of them receive cultural context, with Yoo’s Tina adorably squabbling with her little sister in Korean and eating dinner in a heartwarming family scene, and Entice and Barbie moving through predominantly-Black performance spaces. These details help ground each character in an otherwise free-flowing movie.
With this mix of actors of color, the film paints an inspirational picture of Black-Asian—and in particular, Black-Korean—solidarity in Oakland. It’s a positive take on a history that’s often been fraught, not least because of conventional media’s fanning of the flames, most notoriously during the 1992 LA riots. But with more recent calls for Black-Asian coalition-building in Oakland, which draw on historical partnerships such as the Bay Area’s Third World Liberation Front of the 1960s or Yuri Kochiyama’s activism in Harlem and Oakland, Freaky Tales carries the torch for an aspirational image of how East Asians can better show up for Black people. In the film, Tina comforts Entice when a truckload of young neo-Nazis insults them. She later informs Sleepy Floyd where he can find the white criminals who murdered his girlfriend.
After that, it’s cathartic fun to watch the NBA player—a collector of rare Asian antiques—exterminate the neo-Nazi gang that runs rampant, Ellis boasting martial arts prowess that shows off his years as a pro MMA fighter. But Sleepy Floyd lacks depth; it would’ve been helpful to learn why he became passionate about Asian culture in the first place. Like much of the screenplay, Freaky Tales uses a simplistic take on real-world issues and character development that reaches for easy answers, but in a way that’s still enjoyable to watch.
Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.33/5
Black, Chilean, and Korean American actors put on a great show in Freaky Tales, but the film occasionally strips women of their agency and humanity so that male heroes can go on bloody rampages. (Though plenty of men are butchered onscreen, none are supporting characters we’re meant to empathize with, killed solely so that a woman can fulfill her destiny.) And its escapist fantasies wade in the shallow end of the pool, where Black and Asian characters, though supportive of one another, aren’t fully realized.
Like Freaky Tales? Try these other titles featuring campy killing sprees.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Argylle (2024)