I don’t know much about Oakland, but FREAKY TALES seems designed to be the Oakland-est movie of all time. So Oakland that Too $hort is the narrator and one of the producers and has a cameo as a cop and is a character in the movie played by rapper Demario “Symba” Driver. Also they have a cool retro synth type score but they got Raphael Saadiq to do it.
It’s presented as an anthology film, but it’s the type where each of the stories intersects a little bit and ultimately becomes one story in the last chapter – actually not that far off from the structure of WEAPONS, which I watched the day after I watched this. What it made me keep thinking of though is the made-for-cable movie COSMIC SLOP, even though this is pretty different and definitely way better. I guess just because it’s weird stories hosted by a music icon and named after one of his works.
Although there’s a sci-fi element in a stylishly fake looking “cosmic green stuff” that pops up occasionally (Short Dog figures it “was just one of those freaky things that made the Bay Area so damn fresh” at the time) I think it comes closest to being a crime movie. There’s a hitman, a corrupt cop, and everything revolves around a botched robbery of Golden State Warriors point guard Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis, TOP GUN: MAVERICK). I of course enjoy that type of story, but the standout chapters for me are the two about circa ’87 Bay Area music scenes, following some punk rockers and then a female rap duo, each group having a fateful incident after leaving the same showing of THE LOST BOYS. (read the rest of this shit…)
