Anne Hathaway in At the End of Oak Street.
The End of Oak Street doesn’t really succeed in bringing PG-13 horror
Tat the end of Oak Street may technically be an original film, but I’m pretty sure the director of the film was clearly inspired by one of the most obscure properties imaginable: a house from the late 1980s collectible card game.
A world where prehistoric beasts emerge from mysterious wormholes and start eating the suburbs alive? 35 years ago The end of Oak StreetThis was *precisely* the premise of the infamous Dinosaur attack! Topps line. Some scenes in Oak Street even appear to mirror the images of the trading card game – although, with considerably less blood, guts and horribly inappropriate body horror. This may be a PG-13-rated version of the concept, but it’s a type of grip on the concept all the same.
The end of Oak Street comes to us from David Robert Mitchell. This is the guy who gave us It follows in 2014 and it is by far his most budgeted and star-studded production to date. Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor and around $80 million worth of dinosaur CGI effects – the dude has certainly come a long way since he paid tribute to the neo-Brat Pack about sexually transmitted ghosts.
The end of Oak Street will obviously make comparisons with Jurassic Park. This makes sense, but in execution it’s not even the RIGHT Steven Spielberg’s Reference Point; if anything I would consider Oak Street be more of a tribute to Poltergeist than anything else. The setting, the clothes, the wardrobe, even the dialogues, it’s all It smells like a certain Tobe Hooper movie from 1982, and you wouldn’t know it, This The film also happens to be set in 1982.
Of course, any The horror period piece set in the early 1980s will draw comparisons to Stranger Things. And yes, there are definitely elements of this movie that seem VERY Hawkins-esque. I guess all “Kids on Bikes” movies and TV shows are similar in many ways, but this one certainly it looks like it was inspired by Netflix’s Cash Cow. I’ve seen other websites compare this one to AND, too, but I don’t think that’s a very appropriate connection – I mean, I haven’t seen any of the kids in AND grab a bow and arrows and fight 30-foot-long snake monsters, right?
The end of Oak Street is one of those films where we already KNOW where things are going, so a lot of the initial preparation is sort of unnecessary. There is a tonne subplots happening here – one about Anne Hathaway being a terrible sci-fi writer who wants a divorce, another subplot about Ewan McGregor losing his job and pretending he didn’t and doing pizza deliveries at night, etc. It’s not like the publicity materials are trying to do that. hide the fact that it’s a dinosaur rampage movie, so why is there so much stabling for the first 45 minutes or so? Listen, if you want to put an allosaurus on the theater poster, The sooner you show us that damn allosaurus, the better..
You don’t want me to bore you with the details of the movie, i.e. all the sub-subplots about the neighbors, or how exactly do prehistoric wormholes work, or what role does extinct flora play in the film. The weird thing, though, is that if you’re In this movie just to see the dinosaur carnage unfold… you will probably be disappointed.
There are two MASSIVE problems with this movie. First, because it’s rated PG-13, the real dinosaur mayhem is pretty tame — even tamer than what we see in the movie. Jurassic Park movies. Certainly, I don’t think anyone expected $90 million Carnosaurus gore style in this thing, but I did expect it to be darker and more gruesome than it was. Even when the kids get pecked by pterodactyls and chased by the great-grandfather of the modern-day saltwater crocodile, the tension never really hits. that tense or consistent. Even though a few smaller players were eliminated, the feeling of dread and consequences The end of Oak Street it’s just not very high.
The other major problem with the film, and it’s a big problem, is the CGI effects. I’m not going to lie to you, they look BAD. As in, worse that the effects we had in the first Jurassic Park movie… from 1993. It’s actually pretty amazing how the visual effects suck in this film compared to industry standards just ten years ago. And when you know it’s just actors reacting to non-existent threats in front of a green screen, it’s a bit hard to get lost in the moment.
Yes, there are some good things in the film. The acting is solid, the music is enjoyable, and the attention to detail is pretty cool (say what you want, but the people who made this movie DEFINITELY wanted it to feel as authentically 1982 as they could.) But once it’s all over, you feel a little cheated, and not just because the ending is good too shredder than it should be (with a strength pro-military message that would seem clumsily out of place even during Reagan.) This is a movie with a lot of potential, but the PG-13 rating keeps it from going many places you KNOW the filmmakers wanted to go.
But like I said, it has its moments. My favorite scene? When the ailing marriage of the two main characters is recovered after they took polaroids of two dinosaurs doing it, uh, dinosaur stylefacing one of their neighbors’ houses. Now that’s what this movie I should have summer… MUCH less The lost worldand MUCH more from the second season of Desperate housewives.
GIVE A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, The princess’s diaryunimpressive effects despite an incredibly high budget
DIRECTOR: David Mitchell
WRITER: David Mitchell
WITH : Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
STUDIO: Bad Robot, Jackson Photos
DISTRIBUTER: Photo by Warner Bros.
RUNNING DURATION: 99 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: August 14, 2026
