Hungry dinos trample the burbs

 Advanced publicity for The End of Oak Street blames a mysterious cosmic event for transporting a  typical American suburban neighborhood to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 

  Anne Hathaway, who seems to be everywhere this summer, and Ewan McGregor, who lately has  been working in TV series, star as husband and wife in a high-concept job that keeps them on the run. 

  Director David Robert Mitchell can’t muster the suburban charm that Spielberg has mastered, but his movie begs for comparison with Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, which did a better job of providing a reason for why humans must struggle to keep from becoming dinosaur food, a fate not all Oak Street residents can escape.

   The movie's involuntary time travel involves a large bubble that intermittently appears and serves as a portal through time. As an explanation, it proves laughably feeble. Maybe that was the point.

    Mitchell leans heavily on two young performers — Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. They play the Platt children, who dodge dinosaurs without their parents when Convery's Brian sets out to find his beloved dog Starbuck. His sister follows, and another youngster (Jordan Alexa Davis) eventually joins them.

   The End of Oak Street seems to be turning pages in a give-em-what-they-came-for playbook, offering a series of dinosaur attacks and relying heavily on CGI to keep the film monster heavy and to ensure that these destructive behemoths prove reasonably disgusting.

   A giant snake invading a house makes for one of the best-assembled set pieces and there is (wait for it) a scene of dinosaur copulation), a stab at genre-mocking amusement in the midst of survival terror.

   Watching McGregor's character try to defend himself with a sledgehammer looks a bit silly. Hathaway wields a rifle. But the movie emphasizes flight more than fight.

    Modest attempts are made to deepen the characters. Aspiring to be more than a homemaker,  Hathaway’s Denise is writing a novel; McGregor’s Greg tipples from a hidden bottle; he has been reduced to delivering pizzas to earn extra cash. Husband and wife often argue.

   Best taken as a love letter to ‘80s cinema, End of Oak Street might have done well to lean more heavily into its goofier aspects and tried for full-out comedy. 

  As it stands, a formulaic End of Oak Street offers many views of Hathaway running, Hathaway screaming, and Hathaway expressing fear. 

  It’s not easy to spoof shlock movies without becoming one, a trap that End of Oak Street can’t entirely avoid, but credit Mitchell with moving rapidly until he reaches the film's unfortunately muddled copout of an ending.

 

Horror in the quiet mode

It Follows treats horror as a sexually transmitted disease.

We've all seen plenty of movies in which sex mingles with danger, but few have so directly presented the perils of close encounters as It Follows, a movie that turns horror into a sexually transmitted disease.

Director David Robert Mitchell 's debut movie has received a great deal of attention, partly because it goes against the current horror grain of blood, gore and shock.

In my view, Mitchell's mood-reliant movie has been a bit over-praised, but it deserves credit for taking the usual starting point for teen horror -- sex as a transgression for which a teen-ager (usually a girl) must pay -- and pushing it into menacing terrain.

Mitchell's story revolves around Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old whose sexual encounter with a boy (Jake Weary) results in a singularly devastating consequence.

The young man is being followed by a strange, ill-defined entity that threatens his life and scares the hell out of him. The only way he can rid himself of this horrifying affliction is to pass it on to someone else through sex.

In this sexual game of tag, Jane suddenly is "it."

A disturbing premise sets up a situation in which Jay becomes keenly aware of everyone in her environment and so do we. That's the movie's biggest strength: It has us looking around every frame for trouble. It traps us in its disquiet.

The demon (I use the term as a kind of shorthand, although the movie never really tells us much about the "it" of its title) can appear in a number of guises and is visible only to the person who's being followed.

Once Jay realizes her predicament, she and her initially dubious friends must figure out a way to break the spell under which Jay has fallen.

This demon-busting crew consists of Jay's sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and a couple of friends (Keir Gilchrist and Olivia Luccardi).

Fair to say (as many have) that It Follows is more in touch with the insistently eerie spirit of Korean horror than with American slice-and-dice cinema.

That's a definite plus, but I wouldn't say that the developments in It Follows are entirely credible, and Mitchell sometimes seems to be trying a little too hard to up the anxiety ante.

Still, if you like creepy horror, Mitchell delivers enough of it to make you wonder whether security is little more than illusion.

The score by a musician who calls himself "Disasterpeace" helps create the movie's eerie aura, although it sometimes sounds as if a jumbo jet has taken a drastically wrong turn and is roaring through your head.