Freaky Tales – Saturday 20th September 2025

What a piece of crap.

I was looking forward to watching this film (based on the trailer), expecting ‘Kung Fury’ vibes, which is exactly what you get from the opening credits. However, it’s downhill from there.
The film consists of four seemingly unrelated stories/chapters, that wind up being connected, a conceit that, whilst not original, doesn’t detract from the storytelling.

Where this film does suffer, however, is in portraying a completely unconvincing rendition of 1987. The characters are all modern Gen-Z types, with the same virtue signalling, binary views, and the bad guys are pantomime villains; literal cartoon ‘Nazis’.

The only heroic qualities the heroes posses is that they hate Nazis, and the bad guys are racist. That’s it.
All this would be fine if the stories presented were fun and compelling, but instead, they’re boring and as an audience, there was nothing that made me care about what happened to the characters. Everything about this film is one-dimensional and derivative.

An example of this is when a character preaches non-violence and immediately capitulates because “Nazis”. It would have been interesting to see how you could attempt to defeat an enemy without actually succumbing to being more violent than them; that’s something an actual 80s hero would do.
The film plays around with form, but it just comes across like a film-school project, where they throw every gimmick they can think of at the screen; with none of them really adding anything vital to the story.

I grew up in the 80s and I love 80s movies; this film, although set in that period, fails miserably at looking or feeling like an 80s film; despite using various VHS effects and graphics.
The direction is bad (strange camera angles) and the cinematography is appalling. The visuals are dark, muddy and the colours are garish. The 80s aesthetic was bright and vibrant in the day, and glossy at night with high contrast, hard lighting, wet streets and a smokey haze. It’s a travesty to even pretend that this film depicts that period.

What’s worse, the film clearly had a decent budget, as you can see by the calibre of the stars that appear in it; but it just looks and feels cheap, like a very expensive student film that pretentiously thinks it’s being clever.

Seriously, I hoped this film would be akin to the masterpiece that is ‘Kung Fury’, but this film shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath. As it plodded along, I could not wait for ‘Freaky Tales’ to end.
Do yourselves a favour, watch literally any 80s film instead of this mess; or better still, rewatch ‘Kung Fury’, and the leaked sizzle-reel for ‘Kung Fury 2’.