Ryan Coogler is not the only film-maker this week to have cashed in his Marvel card and made something savagely unexpected. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who burst on to the US indie scene with the lean, hard-edged drama Half Nelson in 2006 and went on to direct Captain Marvel, return to our screens with the grungy homage to exploitation flicks Freaky Tales. The setting for this baggy, loose-limbed anthology of four interconnected stories is Oakland, California, in 1987. But it’s a parallel reality in which residents are able to channel a glowing green cosmic energy, and in which real-life basketball legend “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis) is recast as a martial arts master in a stab-happy Kill Bill-style revenge spree.
It’s not clear whether Boden and Fleck are drawing on Tarantino for inspiration or on the same pulpy grindhouse schlock that informed many of his latter-day exploitation flicks. It hardly matters. With its VHS bargain-bin aesthetic, this is scuzzily enjoyable stuff that pits punks against neo-Nazis, Pedro Pascal’s beaten-up debt collector against Ben Mendelsohn’s chilling corrupt cop; a girl rap duo called Danger Zone against the hip-hop patriarchy. Plus, there’s the added bonus of Tom Hanks clearly having the time of his life as a know-it-all clerk at a video rental store.
In UK and Irish cinemas
