Freaky Tales

Freaky Tales is a genre-defying riot. Come for the crazy mix tape of circuitously connected plotlines, stay for the joyous explosion of vintage breakdancing on the end credits.

That the movie is “only” a silly romp makes it all the more charming to watch Boden and Fleck find a less mechanical, less programmatic way to have fun.

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

It’s rousing stuff and a bit glib.

Ultimately, Freaky Tales works if you don't look too hard at it. It's a fun time and some of the most extreme scenes will make you forget any plot holes or inconsistencies.

The characters here are half-baked, archetypes meant to fit into this semi-supernatural mystery box without the cathartic release that defeating various hate-groups should have.

The bogus tone is grating from the start. It’s vanilla Quentin Tarantino, featuring long, diner-based exchanges, inexplicably glowing boxes and sudden eruptions of violence. Yet, unlike Tarantino, the dialogue is bland, the violence augmented with CGI gore, the set-ups devoid of jeopardy.

Exactly my kind of film. I loved all of the segments But i think the first one was my favorite. I wish more people went to see this one because it was super fun.

“Freaky Tales” isn’t just four intersecting short stories—it’s a riot in cinematic form. There’s a rare, narcotic magic in watching your own ghosts get it right. The film is a bruised kaleidoscope of Oakland memory, bleeding neon, punk-metal bile, and half-sincere VHS futurism. Directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, it unfurls across a mythic 1987 Oakland, bursting with punk rebellion, underground rap duels, video-store cinephilia, and blood-soaked martial-arts vengeance. It thrashes like a dying amp and sings like a forgotten anthem. It’s four stories stitched into the same civic corpse—one city, one day, a fugue state of revolt and reckoning, each tale a molotov lobbed into a different crumbling institution. Pedro Pascal’s in there, but don’t come for him. Come for the scabbed knuckles, the ringing feedback, the righteous shriek of the underdog. And this film is all underdog. Each chapter carries the stink and beauty of that designation like a birthmark. Even when the protagonist is a washed-up rap demigod or a swaggering video store prophet, they remain, in the cosmic calculus of Freaky Tales, underestimated, underfed, overready. The first tale—a glorious dirge of punks vs. **** like a blood-slick handshake to those who remember when subcultures had teeth, not hashtags. You lived there. That grimy corner in the turn of the century where green mohawks were political banners, and the pit was both sanctuary and battleground. You didn’t watch that chapter. You remembered it. It’s not subtle. It’s not meant to be. This is a film that carries its ideology like a spiked bat. The “green energy” that pulses through the narrative, surfacing first as a cultish MacGuffin and finally as an animating myth, isn’t solar, isn’t eco—it’s punk. Not the watered-down, Etsy-anarchist cosplay. No. This is rage as resource. The raw, feral electricity of not-being-welcome and coming anyway. Of **** out a culture under capitalism’s bootheel and calling it beautiful. It's the howl that comes when you realize no one’s coming to save you—and you scream anyway. The musical choices echo this ethos perfectly—when Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” detonates during the first story’s climax, it isn’t just sonic nostalgia. It’s a time capsule cracking open, spilling out your old neighbor’s CD collection, a thousand **** knees, and that one night where the pit turned into something holy. The track, lifted from their 1984 album Ride the Lightning, doesn’t thrash—it looms. It's metal with punk's fatalism, heavy as prophecy. Chapter Two, the rap duel, has less blood but just as much fire. A confrontation with stereotype, elevated to ceremony, rhythmic warfare as class uprising. These girls aren’t just battling a rival MC—they're battling the walls built around them by genre, by gender, by expectation. The joy is infectious. The victory earned. The catharsis real. Because catharsis without cost is ****, and Freaky Tales doesn’t waste time on cheap pleasure. Pascal’s chapter, the third, is the softest underbelly. Weaker, maybe—but only by comparison, like calling a slow-burning fuse boring because it hasn’t exploded yet. It traffics in noir tones and cigarette metaphysics—except the damn cigarette is broken, until suddenly it’s not. That continuity error: a tiny betrayal that fractures belief. And in a film this exact in its chaos, that’s a sin. But there’s something almost poetic in that, too—the lie of cinematic perfection intruding into a story about imperfection’s poetry. Tom Hanks, in what might be the weirdest casting coup in recent memory, becomes the spirit of the video-store sage: the man who remembers. His performance is a kind of necromancy. Every cinephile has met him in some form—a prophet of pan-and-scan pulp, who could smell **** on a VHS spine. Hanks doesn’t act so much as haunt. He evokes a pre-streaming world where knowing about movies was sacred, even dangerous. And that sacredness, flickering behind his eyes, makes the chapter sing. Then there’s the final tale: bloodier, bolder, and the narrative Rosetta stone that reveals the film’s quiet architecture. It’s not just pulp revenge fantasy. It’s Blade meets Bruce Lee via blaxploitation séance, a delirious, ultra-stylized, head-lopping apotheosis of everything that came before. The swords aren’t just weapons—they’re inheritance, rage forged into ritual. It’s ridiculous. It’s perfect. It’s punk as prophecy. And then—then there’s the death of Angus Cloud. A real death, offscreen. A fictional death, on. The overlap is grotesque, uncanny. His demise in the film becomes a kind of funerary performance, unintentional and wrenching. We witness the ghost performing his own ghost. It’s one of those accidental, cruel graces cinema sometimes conjures, where the medium becomes a séance. It’s freaky. Of course it is. Read the full review here: ****/kaffranzka/film/freaky-tales/

It is baffling that such a talented cast managed to get wrapped up in trash like this. 4 sections, loosely connected and tries to tackle numerous issues (racism, sexism, police brutality) with cringeworthy dialogue. Pass on this.

Set in 1987 yet everyone talks like 2020...what's really hilarious is how the first story tried to be edgy while also being very safe and PC. I just hope I'm lucky enough to never watch a film this bad again.

This is an absolute piece of garbage. The BS woke topics that are awkwardly jammed down your throat in the first 15 minutes didn't exist in 1987, because we hadn't been polarized by the media yet. if you were alive in 1987, don't waste your time on this disaster. I'm only sorry I can't give this mess less than 0.