While the “Jurassic Park” franchise has a choke-hold on pretty much everything dinosaur related, it’s nice to see the overgrown lizards show up in something else.
And while I know that “Paw Patrol” is currently experiencing the same late Triassic period phenomena – I’ll be passing on that flick!
“The End of Oak Street” has an interesting premise with a vague wormhole and/or time travel portal component that takes just over three miles’ worth of a 1982 neighborhood and has it swap places with a piece of prehistoric forest.
Naturally, chaos ensues and honestly the most annoying part for me was when the teenage children were doing dumb things.
Outside of that annoyance, the music and set pieces are on point – plus there are plenty of random funny moments even while dinosaurs are tearing into humans and domestic pets.
Oak Street is a science fiction survival film written, co-produced, and directed by David Robert Mitchell.
It stars Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, and Emily Kuroda.
The movie clocks in at 99 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language and suggestive material.
In 1982, aspiring novelist Denise Platt (Hathaway) lives with her husband Greg (McGregor), children Audrey (Stella) and Brian (Convery), and dog Starbuck on Oak Street in the suburban town of Flowervale, Michigan.
The couple’s marriage is strained; Denise privately contemplates divorce, while Greg, having lost his regular job, secretly works odd jobs to support his family while publicly collecting a couple of extra bucks as a pizza delivery driver.
One day, Denise observes and photographs a mysterious plant that suddenly appears in a neighbor’s yard.
The neighbor is confused about how the plant got there and Denise offers to check up on it after helping remove it from the yard.
At the library, the librarian, Mrs. Valcourt (Kuroda) identifies the plant as a species that went extinct roughly 2 million years ago.
Later, an unidentified pile of animal excrement also appears in another neighbor’s yard, while radio broadcasts report increased solar-flare activity.
During a rainstorm, Greg returns home from a pizza delivery, when a huge white light suddenly engulfs Oak Street, accompanied by a change in atmospheric pressure, and a power outage.
The following morning, Denise and Greg leave their house to search for Starbuck, who has gone missing overnight.
Soon, they discover that Oak Street is surrounded by a prehistoric landscape from which dinosaurs emerge, and kill people in the neighborhood.
Back home, Audrey concludes that the flashes of light were wormholes that transported the entire neighborhood millions of years into the past.
That night, Greg reveals he knows Denise is contemplating divorce, while also coming clean about his job delivering pizzas.
Meanwhile, Brian sees Starbuck outside his bedroom window and ventures outside to get him, with Audrey pursuing him when he ignores her attempts to stop him.
They encounter Brian’s neighborhood crush Jeannette Christiansen (Davis), who joins them after revealing her parents have been killed.
Elsewhere, Denise and Greg, while trying to find the children, see a flash of light and follow it to a house containing a wormhole.
They refuse to leave without their children, and unfortunately the wormhole disappears.
But, now Greg and Denise are motivated to find their kids and another wormhole in order to return to 1982.
From there, it seems like the dinosaurs ramp up their hunt for the Platt family and things get even more desperate in a bid for half-baked survival.
Overall, it’s a middling sort of movie that actually manages to have a happy ending.
