Freaky Tales is written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.
The film is a kaleidoscopic, neon-drenched love letter to 1980s Oakland.
It tells us that resistance doesn’t have to be dour. It can be weird and defiantly fun.
While Bollywood seems mired in propaganda filmmaking, where history is twisted into chest-thumping nationalism and dissent painted as villainy, the cinematic soul can grow weary very easily. Add to that the world outside the theatre, where ironic twists of fate cause right-wing pundits like Charlie Kirk—a loud opponent of gun control—to get shot. In moments like these, the heart and mind need a different kind of cinematic nourishment. Not another sermon disguised as cinema, but something scrappy, pulpy, Nazi-slashing, and gloriously strange. A film like Freaky Tales, with its astral projection and Oakland punks battling fascists, is exactly that.
I stumbled upon Freaky Tales almost accidentally, while browsing recent comedy releases. Within minutes of watching the film I felt that forgotten thrill of the pre-Netflix days, when cinephiles had to go sleuthing for hidden gems—sifting through obscure DVDs and late-night film festival lists, only to land on something that felt like it was made just for you. Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the film is a kaleidoscopic, neon-drenched love letter to 1980s Oakland—a city humming with music, politics, violence, and counterculture. But more than that, it is a reminder of cinema’s role as a howl against fascism.
Freaky Tales unfolds as four interconnected stories, each eccentric in its own way, stitched together by the looming presence of fascist forces. Nazis, both literal and metaphorical, creep into every corner—from the corrupt police to the street corners where punks and rappers gather.
The first segment of the film follows a crew of Oakland punks who clash with neo-Nazi skinheads at their underground club, their safe haven. What begins as harassment spills into an attack during a show, until the punk community unites—weapons and glowing green talismans in hand—to fight back in a gloriously over-the-top brawl. The second story pivots to Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), two young women balancing dead-end jobs with dreams of making it as rappers. They confront both sexism and racist policing, but their fiery rap battle against Too $hort becomes a breakthrough. They too are boosted by a strange supernatural glow that is seemingly protecting the freaks and geeks, the downtrodden of Oakland in Freaky Tales. In the third segment, Pedro Pascal plays Clint, a disillusioned debt collector trapped by corrupt bosses and haunted by personal tragedy. Finally, NBA star Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) is reimagined as a martial-arts hero wielding cosmic energy, fusing sports legend with antifascist vengeance.
Each vignette bristles with its own tone, yet they weave together seamlessly, portraying a city where resistance doesn’t arrive from grand speeches but from everyday people—the punks, the working class, the loners—banding together against a common enemy: fascists.
Part of what makes Freaky Tales so irresistible is its unabashed homage to films like Pulp Fiction (1994) and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010). Like Pulp Fiction, Freaky Tales relishes in nonlinear storytelling, sharp tonal shifts, pulpy violence, and dialogue that crackles with self-aware bravado. Like Scott Pilgrim, it embraces comic-book stylisation, sudden bursts of animation, and the unapologetic blending of realism with surreal fantasy.
These homages operate like winks and reminders that cinema has always been at its best when it revels in play. For every Nazi head-bash and slash, there is the delight of the supernatural too with its cheeky inclusions of a vigilante hero who can astral project; for every blood-splattered street fight, there is a meditation interlude. The effect is disarming, absurd, and, most importantly, fun.
The structure of the film itself refuses the solemnity that often accompanies “important” cinema. Instead, it embraces chaos, bending form and genre until Oakland in the 1980s feels like a living comic book. By turning the fight against fascism into a neon fever dream, Freaky Tales suggests that joy and irreverence can be as potent a weapon as solemn rhetoric.
Freaky Tales had its world premiere at Sundance in 2024. After the festival buzz, it arrived quietly in U.S. theatres in 2025. Its release lacked the marketing juggernaut of studio-backed fare, but perhaps that was fitting. Films like this thrive in discovery. They are meant to be stumbled upon late at night, watched with friends, argued over, laughed at, and remembered not for box office receipts but for the jolts of electricity they leave behind.
In a global moment where cinema is too often weaponised for propaganda—where movies are pressed into service as tools for cultural dominance—films like Freaky Tales feel like hidden gems worth regaling. In its excess, it tells us that resistance doesn’t have to be dour. It can be weird and defiantly fun. It sits somewhere in the close proximity of films like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018).
While Tarantino turned history into pulp, rewriting World War II as a revenge fantasy where Jewish guerrillas scalp Nazis and burn Hitler in a movie theatre, Riley weaponised absurdist satire to lay bare capitalism’s fascist underbelly, using Oakland again as his stage. Freaky Tales belongs to this lineage: works that reject reverence in favour of irreverence and surrealism to puncture the myths of authoritarian power. Anti-fascist cinema like Freaky Tales serves as aesthetic resistance and that is why it becomes a must-watch; if nothing but for serving as some chicken soup for the frayed soul.
Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.
