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(Review) THE END OF OAK STREET: Dinosaurs Have Invaded the Cul-de-Sac, and Suburbia Is Screwed

By. Professor Horror

When I first learned about THE END OF OAK STREET, I knew it had dinosaurs...and I knew nothing else. Because really, that was all I needed. A movie with dinosaurs? Say less. But the setup makes that promise even better: an ordinary suburban neighborhood in 1982 is suddenly ripped out of its own time and dropped into a prehistoric world where dinosaurs are now roaming the cul-de-sac. While a lot of dinosaur movies love to play with the "man plays god, nature bites back" formula (pun intended), OAK STREET takes an entirely different approach. Nobody here is cloning anything. Nobody is drilling into amber or splicing frog DNA into a fence-hopping apex predator. Everyone is just living their suburban life, minding their own business, and then BAM: dinosaurs. Director David Robert Mitchell (the man behind It Follows and Under the Silver Lake) trades his usual dread-soaked atmospherics for something louder and hungrier, and the result is, without hyperbole, the best dinosaur movie since Jurassic Park.

It's the 80s, or more specifically 1982, a prehistoric era in its own right where we experienced things like the J. Geils Band, Carl Sagan explaining the cosmos to us on television, and the quintessential, white-picket idea of suburbia. Kids ride their bikes up and down the street, and the whole neighborhood turns out for a block party. This is where we meet the Platt family, and where the movie plants the roots of everything it's about to dig up. There's Brian (Christian Convery), who's inseparable from his dog, Starbuck. There's his sister Audrey (Maisy Stella), who dreams of Cornell and science. And there are the parents: Denise (Anne Hathaway), a strong, no-nonsense, independent woman working on a novel, and Greg (Ewan McGregor), a dad in short shorts who is exactly as "dad" as that sounds. Suburbia looks perfect on the surface, but Greg and Denise's marriage has been strained for a long time, and it's reaching its tipping point. They know it. The kids know it. It's just a matter of time until somebody actually pulls the plug.

But this movie isn't just about family troubles. Well, it is. But it goes way beyond paying bills or keeping secrets. Their troubles very quickly escalate into surviving massive meat-eaters roaming their street. During a storm one night, the entire neighborhood is ripped out of the 80s and dropped into a time long before it, a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and now, they rule Oak Street too.

Jurassic Park became the runaway dinosaur movie in 1993, and it's still the measuring stick every dino movie gets held up against. OAK STREET creates a much more brutal environment, and it does it by refusing to play by Jurassic rules. Nobody here is looking for dinosaurs. These aren't researchers, paleontologists, or theme park engineers who knowingly walked into a world filled with prehistoric predators. They're ordinary people who went to bed in suburbia and woke up somewhere they were never supposed to be. They don't know what they're dealing with, what might be hunting them, or even what rules apply anymore. There's no visitor center to run toward, no electric fence between them and the carnivores, and certainly no conveniently knowledgeable paleontologist around to explain which dinosaur is currently trying to eat them. That makes the brutality hit differently. When someone gets torn apart, they aren't suffering the consequences of playing God or ignoring repeated warnings about the dangers of resurrecting extinct animals....they were at a block party yesterday. The people of Oak Street did absolutely nothing to invite this nightmare into their lives, and the film's willingness to kill them anyway gives the violence a nastier, more unpredictable edge. Nobody is safe because nobody was ever supposed to be here in the first place.

Just as exciting is the sheer variety of prehistoric life THE END OF OAK STREET throws at us. Of course, some familiar thunder lizards make appearances, but the movie doesn't simply pull out the same handful of dinosaurs Hollywood has been recycling since the '90s. Instead, Oak Street becomes a prehistoric buffet of increasingly strange creatures. We get Coelophysis, the long-necked Camarasaurus, and plenty of other animals that sent me down a post-movie rabbit hole just to figure out what the hell I had just watched. And then there's my personal favorite: Titanoboa, because apparently dinosaurs weren't enough and this movie also needed a snake the size of a school bus. The creature design makes that variety even more fun. These aren't all interchangeable scaly monsters; they're furry, feathery, slimy, massive, tiny, familiar, and completely bizarre. Every time you think you've figured out what kind of prehistoric nightmare OAK STREET wants to be, something new comes stomping, slithering, or scurrying into frame. That sense of discovery is something dinosaur movies have been missing for a long time. For once, I wasn't waiting to see when the T. rex would show up. I was waiting to see what the hell was coming through the hedges next.

If Spielbergian spectacle and suburban unease are your thing, don't miss our review of DISCLOSURE DAY, which finds its own kind of terror in the sky over an ordinary American neighborhood.

It's been decades since we've had a genuinely good dinosaur movie (special, if slightly unhinged, props to The Velocipastor and Invisible Raptor for scratching a very different itch). THE END OF OAK STREET is the dinosaur movie we've been waiting for. Hathaway and McGregor anchor the chaos with complete commitment, while Christian Convery gives the film much of its heart as a kid whose ordinary suburban life has suddenly become anything but. But let's be clear: the dinosaurs are the reason to show up, and OAK STREET understands the assignment. They're scary, weird, brutal, sometimes hilarious, and occasionally doing things I can safely say I've never seen dinosaurs do in a movie before (when you see it you'll know). There's a sense of gleeful unpredictability to the whole thing, as though Mitchell was handed a prehistoric toy box and told to go nuts. Hopefully THE END OF OAK STREET opens the door for more filmmakers to get weird and creative with prehistoric life, because there are millions of years of creatures out there beyond the same handful Hollywood keeps bringing back from extinction. When we were kids, one of the most important questions anyone could ask was, "What's your favorite dinosaur?" Somewhere along the way, we apparently decided we were supposed to grow out of having an answer. OAK STREET is a pretty great reminder that deep down, we're all still the kid who wants to talk about dinosaurs. We just need movies willing to give us some new ones to talk about.

For more of what's currently prowling theaters, check out our reviews of THE DEVIL'S MOUTH and EVIL DEAD BURN, two more new releases currently sinking their teeth into theaters.

THE END OF OAK STREET is in theatres now!