What happens if your neighborhood is suddenly dropped into the dinosaur era? That’s the Steven Spielberg's-inspired, absurd premise of “The End of Oak Street” and it’s madly effective.
The film, tinted in golden hues, focuses on the Platt family, living in an idyllic suburbia in the 1980s, with their dog, Starbuck. There are block parties and shared barbeques celebrating summer, neighbors watching out for one another, and kids playing on the streets and riding bikes together.
Greg (Ewan McGregor; “The Impossible,” “Perfect Sense,” “Haywire”) and Denise (Anne Hathaway, “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Ocean 8,” “One Day”) have had marital problems, which they’ve tried to hide from their teenage son, Brian (Christian Convery) and daughter, Audrey (Maisey Stella).
Greg drinks and he has been secretly laid off, trying to generate cash through delivering pizza. Denise has been writing a novel at home, fantasizing about traveling solo and leaving everything behind. Audrey dreams to go to Cornell to study astronomy, even though she knows her family wouldn’t be able to afford it. Brian is acting out and secretly smoking.
One night, there’s a rainstorm, bright lights and booming sound. Other than power outage and no running water, it seems to be a temporary inconvenience. It soon becomes a life-and-death ordeal, however, when they spot a dinosaur in their neighborhood. And another and another. Their neighborhood has been transported into millions of the years into the past, trampled on and overrun by these dangerous prehistoric creatures.
The jaw-dropping shock, panic, and fear turn into real nightmares when the family realizes there’s no way out. Their neighborhood is surrounded by prehistoric plants, forest, volcano and lake, dinosaurs roaming around freely and hunting for food, as if they’re in their natural habitat.
These predators mean business and it’s brutal. Man-eating dinosaurs are nothing new, but the way the scenes are shot is stellar. Not only is a surreal to see so many magnificent species – land, air, and water (considerably more than “Jurassic World”) and when they start the gnawing and chomping, but also when sightings are unseen, things are rustling around, ransacking, falling down, shaking, cracking and breaking apart.
There are genuinely tense and heart-stopping action sequences. The more terrifying ones are not the ones stomping out in the open; it’s the ones creepily creeping up or slithering with silence, before loudly opening up their predator-teeth mouths, cornering and trapping people. That said, there are also sightings and interactions that will bring out laughter.
This is a movie that doesn’t explain the why, but the what and how are executed really well, and how it ends just works. You’re riding along strapped in your seat with your hands gripping the steering wheel without knowing which direction to go and run for escape.
Filled with terror and heart, “The End of Oak Street” takes you on a bewilderingly wild ride.
