Freaky Tales review – Pedro Pascal-led 80s anthology isn’t freaky enough

Sundance film festival: Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have made a bizarrely misjudged hodgepodge of gore, needle drops and nostalgia

More often than not, the opening night slot at Sundance has become more curse than blessing, too many films living and dying in just one night, barely to be seen again. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sci-fi comedy The Pod Generation anyone? How about the Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore melodrama After the Wedding? Daisy Ridley’s suicide drama Sometimes I Think About Dying? Or maybe that sequel to An Inconvenient Truth that you didn’t even know existed? This year’s sacrificial lamb, the 80s-set anthology Freaky Tales, is nothing if not confident in its ability to make an impact, asserting itself as an experience that won’t easily be forgotten.

Acting as its own hype man, the film begins with a block of narrated opening text positioning what we’re about to see as a “hella wild” ride, a promise that had already been made during its introduction, excitably sold to us as something that would make certain audience members’ heads explode. But while the film’s makers – the writer-director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck – might seem to think that they’ve made a new cult classic, it’s hard to share in their bullish enthusiasm, eye-rolling fatigue meeting their insistence that this is something to be quoted, rewatched and adored. For as bold as Boden and Fleck seem to think Freaky Tales is, it’s a hodgepodge of things we’ve seen done before and done better, a sub-Tarantino fanboy assembly of vaguely interconnected stories that belongs less in the 80s and more in the mid-to-late 90s when every American indie wannabe was trying to emulate their new icon.

Freaky Tales is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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