‘End of Oak Street’ Is a Stroll in Triassic Park

The End of Oak Street, the new movie from Gen-X director David Robert Mitchell, best known for his horror feature It Follows from the previous decade, is a curious artifact, like something from the back of the Video Outlet shelves in the 1980s. This is partly a deliberate choice on Mitchell’s part, but maybe not as deliberate as he might like. The film is set in 1980, paced and shot like a film from the 80s, but it also features clunky dialogue and half-drawn supporting characters that barely feel good enough to carry a student film from that era, much less a mid-tier summer action flick.

The End of Oak Street ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: David Robert Mitchell
Written by: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella
Running time: 99 mins

Our premise is that the Platts, an ordinary small-town Michigan family, parented by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, live in a neighborhood that somehow travels back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, thanks to a prehistoric wormhole. Apparently, rural Michigan was quite biologically fecund 200 million years ago, because an endless phalanx of horrific prehistoric monsters, including an eighty-foot-long sea snake that’s one of the scariest creatures to appear on screen in a while, immediately besets the town, eating all the people and most of their hapless pets.

McGregor’s character is an unemployed alcoholic who delivers pizza for spare change, highly unlikely, and Hathaway is a repressed genius who types away in her basement on a novel about a sexually-frustrated repressed genius novelist who wants to leave her family. Somehow, that feels less unlikely. They have two annoying and mostly useless teenage kids who have terrible taste in TV and music, and a spunky but troublemaking dog named Starbuck. Together, they must band together and fight this dino-menace.

To Mitchell’s credit, he knows they don’t stand a chance against the rampaging cold-blooded hordes. A rifle and a baseball bat might work against one dinosaur, but not against the entire Triassic era. Horrors and much snuffling and whining ensue. “Mom, are we going to die?” Yes, Timmy, or whatever your name is, you’re going to die.

The End of Oak Street used no AI in creating its dinosaurs, many of which have a kind of hairy or rubbery look to them, a blue phosphorent glow that gives the movie a little analog charm. It feels only a couple of steps removed from Ray Harryhausen animation. The jump-scares and revelations mostly work, and the action moves along crisply. As an amusement-park ride, it works quite well.

It falls short, however, on delivering the emotional punch of the best of 80s horror-action-comedy. The teenage characters are all incredibly thin, and the acting is poor. One never knows from where the next big star might emerge, but this doesn’t appear to be the seedbed of promising careers, though Maisy Stella, who plays their teenage daughter Audrey, has a bit of juice and has been working consistently since her years as a child star on the TV show Nashville. McGregor, surprisingly, is quite stiff, his character poorly written. Many of his lines feel pro forma, almost dubbed in. He’s rubbery and charmless.

Hathaway is a different story. It’s impressive that the A-listest of actresses would lend her skills to such a distinctly and proudly B movie. Her character is some sort of unholy fusion of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Jobeth Williams in Poltergeist, and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. Hathaway must have studied Williams’ performance in particular. She delivers the best suburban-mom-in-supernatural-terror performance in decades.

The End of Oak Street isn’t a particularly good film. You can almost see the flop sweat and editing it required to make it remotely watchable. But it is the most August film we’ve seen in years. This is the kind of thing that the studios used to release into theaters in the waning days of summer, when the biggest blockbusters had faded and the dread of a new school year loomed. You could always rent it later. But sometimes there’s a benefit to seeing it now, when the air’s still hot, the pool’s still open, and the T-Rex is rampaging down main street.