My Cultural Diet

The Platts — Greg and Denise, and their kids Audrey and Brian — are a picture-perfect American family living in a picture-perfect neighborhood. But the cracks are beginning to show: Greg is constantly dipping out to work odd hours while Denise, an aspiring novelist, feels smothered in suburbia, and their kids have their own difficulties. The Platts’ strife is only made worse when their entire neighborhood is somehow transported back in time hundreds of millions of years, and their picture-perfect neighborhood becomes overrun with dinosaurs. The fun of bizarre survival movies like The End of Oak Street is that they let you ask yourself, “What would I do if my neighborhood was suddenly transported back to dinosaur times?” I’d like to think that I’d do a fair sight better than the Platts, who consistently prove their lack of situational awareness. Which is perhaps a metaphor for why their marriage is crumbling, but that might be giving the script too much credit. In hindsight, I probably should’ve been cheering for the dinosaurs to eat the bickering family. The End of Oak Street is set in 1982, so naturally, writer/director David Robert Mitchell seeks to employ Spielberg’s aesthetic, including a series of increasingly gratuitous split diopter shots. But the film has no fun or sense of wonder, just scene after scene of annoying suburbanites doing really dumb things and somehow surviving. (To be fair, there is one scene where the Platts watch two dinosaurs do it doggy-style against a neighbor’s house, but that’s neither fun nor all that wonderful. You might feel differently, though.)

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