Marvel Studios’ output is quickly thinning in both volume and in cultural significance, with most of the studio’s episodic superhero adventures now being siphoned off to their rightful place: television. Superhero movies’ stranglehold on multiplex screen space is finally loosening, and the newfound breathing room is allowing for a wider range of theatrical counterprogramming to share the marquee with the usual Disney-brand corporate clutter. It’s also allowing former Marvel Studios directors to express themselves in more personal art, freed from the boardroom & shareholder obligations that come with billion-dollar IP. In the past, whenever Marvel picked up an indie-darling director like a James Gunn or a Taika Waititi, it meant that they would be trapped into churning out corporate #content for the rest of their careers, the same way James Cameron has voluntarily imprisoned himself in an Avatar sequel factory of his own design. This year has seen two exciting breaks from that trend, and together they suggest that there’s a very specific formula for escaping the creative funk that usually results from Marvel Studios employment. Both Sinners and Freaky Tales find MCU alumni from Oakland going out their way to depict cunnilingus and white supremacist ass whoopings in gory genre-mashup musicals, begging to be categorized in one of those two-movie Letterboxd lists with absurdly long titles. While one of those Oaklander pattern-breakers found great financial success in every American multiplex, the other had only a whisper of a theatrical rollout before quietly popping up on HBO Max months later. Still, they combine to represent a hope for a brighter future, one with fewer superhero blockbusters, more onscreen sex, and populist art that’s unafraid to alienate fanboy bigots.

Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck have assembled a mixtape homage to Fleck’s youth in 1980s Oakland. Old school rapper Too $hort acts as a local cultural ambassador for the scene, which is a smart move for two white directors depicting a city so widely associated with Black pop culture. Besides coining the title Freaky Tales in one of his classic tracks, Too $hort also acts as the anthology film’s wraparound narrator, appears in a cameo role, and is depicted as an onscreen character by fellow Bay Area rapper Symba (who acts out the film’s onscreen depiction of cunnilingus, an essential part of the Marvel-deviation formula). More improbably, Freaky Tales also features a lengthy battle-rap performance of the infamously raunchy Too $hort track “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” something I can confidently say I never expected to see given the superhero origin story treatment in a movie. Likewise, I never thought I’d see a fictional depiction of an Operation Ivy concert in a movie either, which is where this violent Oaklander saga begins. In the first section, the local Oakland punk scene bands together to violently dispose of the Nazi skinheads who repeatedly crash their (seemingly nightly) Operation Ivy shows. This is followed by the “Don’t Fight the Feelin'” origin story, a video store crime spree featuring celebrities Tom Hanks & Pedro Pascal and, finally, a heist sequence in which Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd plays a career-high basketball game before slaughtering the home-invading thugs who kill his family while he’s on the court. Besides the local legend of Too $hort, Ben Mendelson is the main connective piece between these freaky tales, playing a creepy cop who houses & deploys Nazi skinheads to do his evil bidding. Every tale is about stomping those Nazi shitheads into the ground, and yet the mixtape soundtrack does not include the Dead Kennedys classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” likely because that song spiritually belongs to San Francisco on the other side of The Bay.

There are some retro cult-cinema signifiers here that ring a little hollow, especially in its Pulp Fiction-aping anthology format and its dual use of both video tape tracking and visible reel changes via digital filters. Still, Freaky Tales feels convincingly authentic to Fleck’s civic pride, adapting his & Boden’s superhero filmmaking impulses to something more personal & heartfelt. The visual manifestation of there being something special in the air in mid-80s Oakland is in the frequent strikes of green lightning, a supernatural power that flows through major players like Too $hort, Sleepy Floyd, and the Operation Ivy scenesters. It’s a communal energy that sometimes translates to Scanners-style superpowers, but for the most part it’s more vibe than fact. The real power here is the communal ability to stomp out Nazi bigots when everyone works in unison, which the movie has a lot of fun depicting in absurdly bloody detail during its biggest action set pieces. There are no fewer than four song changes during Sleepy Floyd’s slaughter of the home-invading skinheads, so that he can act out his Bruce-Lee-doing-Blade superhero fantasy for as long as the budget will allow. Freaky Tales loves Oakland, hates Nazis, and believes Too $hort to be the golden god of the local scene, which is a sentiment with more auteurist specificity & political conviction than you will find in any Marvel movie. It cannot pretend to share the same cultural impact as fellow Oaklander-done-good genre mashup Sinners, but it does share its refreshing glimpse into a post-MCU future, where big-budget movies are surprising & fun again and the furthest-right end of their potential audience is no longer coddled for the sake of making a few extra bucks.

-Brandon Ledet