The End Of Oak Street

Bluesky

It's 1982, and the Platt's suburban idyll is such that the neighbourhood block party is occasion for one of the area residents to say the kind of sentence that only appears in movies - "You've got a great family". Inevitably, there's at least one secret in the basement, as the kind of movies that kind of sentence appears in are also the kind of movies where those great families are imperilled.

Director (and writer) David Robert Mitchell caught critical and audience favour with It Follows and while subsequent works have been few they were perhaps as inevitable as that film's 'foe'. My colleague highlighted the debt that Under The Silver Lake owed to David Lynch and The End Of Oak Street is similarly borrowing, with unfortunately similar outcomes, from another director.

I'd give you the chance to guess, but the presence of producer JJ Abrams makes it quite a bit easier. That's even without the bits lifted from Jaws, ET, and, of course, Jurassic Park.

It's only obviously not based on a latter Stephen King work because Oak Street isn't in Maine. There are probably other Stephens who could be influences. That includes Baxter who wrote an authorised sequel to The Time Machine and probably Seagal who made a career of films that can be entertaining in places but don't bear closer scrutiny. Of course it's Spielberg (who is admittedly a Steven) whose ouevre is most reproduced here and while his works' quality might vary the proportion of his films that are well above surface level is far more than would fit in any iceberg diagram.

It isn't that there aren't places where The End Of Oak Street could be more solid, or chilling, or even shattering, but that it's all a bit cool, and definitely a bit damp. Anne Hathaway's underserved by the script and perhaps even less helped by editing and having to react to whatever was on-set before the effects were. Ewan McGregor's had several tries at costarring with digitally-replaced tennis-balls on sticks and his American accent holds up. Expectations for both are high, but subversions are few. Michael Giacchino's score is one of the films better elements, though I suspect he could have kept one hand behind his back for muc of it as the 'John Williams' key was taped down. The tunes that aren't part of the score might mean the local cable provider has acceded to demands of I Want My MTV but as with Donnie Darko's cinematic soundtrack they do rather stretch credibility. Which is perhaps a bit silly when dinosaurs turn up, but they're less of a surprise than other elisions.

There's a dog called Starbuck and in case you missed the reference there are Battlestar Galactica posters to remind you. The central conceit does invite comparisons with the similarly vintage and also-syndicated TV show Land Of The Lost but that's not mentioned. The prospect of disaster breaking down civilisation at the level of families and fences has precedent, with various times of living dead chief among them. The reactions to the presence of the prehistoric are often in the background, but as things pop off it seems another element underdeveloped. Polaroids are among the period details that feel like photocopied nostalgia.

There are conveniences that come from the era, though reference librarians remain a more reliable resource than any search engine. There's much made that we're in an era of pizza delivery, and paleontological progress means that our prehistoric pests are florid and feathery, rather than amphibiously ambiguous. For the most part they're well used, some early sequences with them on-screen but out-of-sight are well executed if not original. They're hampered by also being used for the family's canine companion, as while dinosaurs might have been updated it's all too easy to spot a dodgy dog.

The kids will, again with a degree of inevitability, go looking for the mutt when he goes missing. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery are perhaps best known for television roles, she in Nashville more than he in Sweet Tooth, but in an era of streaming that's not certain. They do well, but shots that use depth of focus to give us familial background on one side and (often parental) close-ups on the other are a sort of recursive foregrounding. Suspending disbelief for ferns and pterosaurs often means much closer scrutiny of the things we've direct experience of and its in comparison, both in the picture and personal lives that The End Of Oak Street suffers.

Tonally it's mixed, stuck with an all-too-common trait in the fantastic where child-like wonder is replaced with an immature need to seem adult. Foul language, faecal matter, and lashings of gore combine with a few jumps and other moments of menace to make a film that would be too scary for the tweens who'd otherwise be an ideal audience. Or, perhaps, ones who'd remember this fondly enough to make films that sought to replicate it at least one generation hence.

It might be ideal sleepover fodder, in truth, but I'm long past those and I don't think this is as entertaining as any of those which would have been available in the VHS era. In those days they said to be kind and rewind but for this there's not much to be said for a retread. When the rubber meets the road of The End Of Oak Street it doesn't quite grip. It's not quite a dead end, but it's not diverting enough to make it worth the detour.

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