Review: The End of Oak Street

One of my greatest fears was waking up some morning and discovering that my entire neighborhood had been mysteriously teleported to a prehistoric world teaming with ravenous dinosaurs.

Truth be told, that thought never actually crossed my mind.  In all honesty, it was never on my top ten list of terrifying things that keep me up at night, though the movie The End of Oak Street has possibly bumped it onto my radar.  That scenario is exactly what happens in David Robert Mitchell’s family sci-fi adventure. 

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play a young, married, suburban couple in the early 80s with two teenage kids.  Their lives seem relatively normal until they wake up one morning, following a night of strange bright lights and loud noises, to discover they and their entire neighborhood have somehow been transported into something resembling Jurassic Park -- except it isn’t a futuristic amusement park.  It’s an actual world of deadly dinosaurs of every size and description.

The family has no idea how they got there or how (or even if) they can get out.  All they know is they are stranded in a strange world with precious little food or water, surrounded by monstrous reptilian predators. 

At one point, they surmise they must have been sucked through some sort of portal or wormhole.  The movie doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation.  The audience is just asked to take the leap, suspend disbelief and identify with the bewildered family struggling to stay alive in a hostile environment where the odds of survival are staggeringly stacked against them.

It’s man versus dinosaur, a recurrent theme in the movies despite the fact that the age of dinosaurs and human beings were separated by roughly 66 million years.  Pairing them up has been endlessly entertaining over the years in movies like The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), One Million Years B.C., starring Raquel Welch (1966) and, of course Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993).  It’s the ultimate fantasy matchup for any kid who ever played with plastic dinosaurs in grade school.

The End of Oak Street begs the question of what would happen if your family, including the family dog, ever found themselves in that situation.  While the premise might be preposterous, the movie just pushes ahead, distracting us with terrifying scenes of neighbors and friends being chased, killed and eaten.  It becomes clear as David Byrne from Talking Heads might have put it, “this ain’t no foolin’ around.”

The movie gleefully cashes in on suspense and horror.  While the creature effects may not rival those in higher budget movies like the Jurassic Park or its sequels and spinoffs, they are adequate in the telling of this run-for-your-life story.  One huge, slithery creature in particular is sure to trigger nightmares for everyone who casts their eyes upon it.

It’s been a busy year for Anne Hathaway who also starred in Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey.  While this might not be her most high-profile role, she makes the most of her character as a troubled mom, secretly writing a semi-autobiographical novel, suddenly cast into an unimaginable world.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell is clearly a Steven Spielberg fan, evidenced by the many references to projects like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, which Spielberg directed) and Poltergeist (1982 which Spielberg co-wrote and produced) and Spielberg’s masterpiece, Jurassic Park. It’s a nice adaptation of Spielberg’s familiar, signature style, clearly borrowed, but it works.

Make no mistake, The End of Oak Street is not on a par with Jurassic Park.  It’s an adaptation of some old television sci-fi material dredged up from a 1960s episode of The Outer Limits which was remade in the 1990s.  It definitely has a Twilight Zone kind of vibe that might have earned Rod Serling’s approval (with the possible exception of the movie’s ending).

While it might not be the biggest hit at the box office this summer, The End of Oak Street is entertaining enough to earn some respectable money.  As with other successful summer movies over the years, it offers fun and escape.

And some scary-ass dinosaurs.