Video Wednesdays: The End of Oak Street or What Not To Do If Your Neighborhood Gets Dropped Into A Pre-Historic Hellscape

Apparently suburban folk in the early 1980s had zero survival instincts and took way too long to recognize imminent danger. At first it took me a moment to pin down the era portrayed in the opening scenes, the crowded residential street fair was my first clue that this is not a contemporary 2020s setting. Everyone listening to music on Sony Walkmans, short gym shorts, teenagers on single-speed bicycles and folks using typewriters helped figuring out that it was the early 80s. This movie is dripping with Spielbergian “smile at the neighbors while hiding immense dissatisfaction inside” themes, and spent a lot of time setting up that world before shit (literally) happened. In that the film was promoted as a horror film, I had no idea if anyone was going to survive or how that might happen. Once the dinosaurs made their appearance and the gore started to happen, I imagined that they just might throw out the optimistic Spielberg tendencies and go full “Game of Thrones.

Is it worth a watch? Any decent dinosaur adventure should be worth watching on a big screen with the sound cranked up. And this one is definitely a summer, don’t overthink anything kind of movie. If anything It’s worth a watch just to contemplate how well you might deal with such a sudden radical change that you cannot overtly prepare for. I know we all assume that we’d never be one of those idiots caught outside thinking we can outrun enormous bipedal carnivores. Sorry, no one would be ready for this. The question is how quickly would we adjust and, predatory dinosaurs not withstanding, how long would we survive without our meds, electricity, clean water… FB? Enjoy. JBB

[Movie viewed at Regal Fox Tower on 2026-08-24]

SPOILER WARNING: I really felt like the story was just unpredictable enough that no one was going to get out of this alive. It certainly didn’t help that they, especially the boy, kept leaving shelter after the sun went down. And they did it without communicating with anyone else in their group. It is a miracle that anyone survived.

I am getting a bit tired of the foolish dog (tied to its doghouse) mindlessly barking at a giant carnivorous dinosaur movie trope. At least in this case the family dog did much better than all of the cats in the film (who tended to lay low but then wander out at just the wrong moment).

In the end, I did have a problem with Anne Hathaway’s Denise, ordering a pizza to trick her husband to drive away from their neighborhood and thus avoid what was going to happen in a couple minutes. And how was she able to contact all of the neighbors to get them to safety in the 20 minutes that they had before the event? More than a few online reviews also note the F-d up thinking that she saved her “husband” but let the other Denise and kids get sucked into the hellscape that they had just escaped without the husband to help them survive. That makes the ending quite dark. Yikes. JBB

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