Pulpy dinosaur survival film The End Of Oak Street begs for backhanded compliments

The end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom imagines a world where dinosaurs coexist alongside humans, no longer confined to remote mad-scientist islands and walking among us in the greater world. This idea was quickly walked back by Jurassic World Rebirth, presumably because it’s not conducive to a massive blockbuster franchise to see that thought experiment through to its worldshifting end. The End Of Oak Street doesn’t bother thinking much through either, but for very different reasons. Taking the scene in Lost World where a T-Rex tears up a ritzy San Diego neighborhood to its illogical conclusion, the dino B-movie imagined by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under The Silver Lake) realizes that this merging of eras wouldn’t be a cutesy event, observed through faux nature-doc footage, but a total bloodbath. Picking apart Spielbergian wonder like a flock of Pteranodons nipping at a human body, The End Of Oak Street tears stereotypical ’80s suburbia a new one (well, a very, very old one) and it’s all as silly as it sounds.

There’s something invigorating about a filmmaker of Mitchell’s caliber making what amounts to a SYFY Original creature feature, inspiring a buzzing desire to deliver backhanded compliments. Yes, it’s dimwitted and repetitive, but isn’t it cool that a studio put this out? Sure, there aren’t really characters, but look at those dinosaurs! The floaty, fakey, over-managed Jurassic juggernaut has so deadened cinema’s relationship with dinosaurs that it simply feels good to watch something as straightforward as these animals—not crossbred with anything else, not mutated in a lab, not trained to be weapons—hunting through the backyards and bedrooms of a Michigan neighborhood. When Oak Street, and its surrounding blocks, are zapped back through time (for reasons even the movie knows are best not lingered on), sheer high-concept simplicity overwhelms all else: There are dinosaurs now, deal with it.

That’s about all the complexity that the Platt family can handle. Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor), and their kids—dweeby Audrey (Maisy Stella) and young Brian (Christian Convery), whose trait is that he loves the family dog—have the depth of a minor afterschool special from the early ’80s, which is when the film takes place. In fact, Oak Street is a little like 1983’s post-nuke TV movie Testament—all vignettes of familial survival after a seismic shift—but with goofy dinosaur action instead of heartbreaking radiation sickness.

But first come the broad strokes, whipped across the film’s canvas with the carelessness of someone single-mindedly intent on getting to the damn dinos already. There’s the grumpy neighbor, the sweet elderly acquaintance, the new girl who moved in down the way. Greg takes a single pull of whiskey to cope with the shock, while Denise mourns the loss of her manuscript about domestic ennui. Their marriage is on the rocks, but couples therapy has nothing on whacking dinosaurs with a baseball bat.