The End of Oak Street doesn’t exactly succeed at bringing the PG-13 horror
The End of Oak Street may technically be an original movie, but I’m pretty sure the director of the film was clearly inspired by one of the most obscure properties imaginable: a late 1980s trading card set.
A world where prehistoric beasts emerge from mysterious wormholes and begin eating suburbia alive? A good 35 years before The End of Oak Street, that was *precisely* the premise of the infamous Dinosaurs Attack! line from Topps. A few scenes in Oak Street even seem to MIRROR the images from the trading card deck — albeit, with considerably less blood, guts and horrifically inappropriate body horror. It might be a PG-13 rated take on the concept, but it’s a kind of take on the concept all the same.
The End of Oak Street comes to us from David Robert Mitchell. He’s the guy who gave us It Follows back in 2014 and this is easily his biggest budgeted, most star-studded production to date. Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor and about $80 million worth of dinosaur CGI effects — the dude sure has come a long way since making neo-Brat Pack homages about sexually transmitted ghosts.
The End of Oak Street is obviously going to draw comparisons to Jurassic Park. That makes sense, but in execution it’s not even the right Steven Spielberg reference point; if anything, I’d consider Oak Street to be more of a tribute to Poltergeist than anything else. The setting, the clothing, the wardrobe, even the dialogue — it all reeks of a certain Tobe Hooper movie from 1982, and wouldn’t you know it, this movie just so happens to be set in ‘82, as well.
Of course, any horror period piece set in the early 1980s these days is going to draw comparisons to Stranger Things. And yeah, there are definitely elements of this movie that feel VERY Hawkins-esque. I guess all “kids on bikes” movies and TV shows feel similar in a lot of obvious ways, but this one definitely feels like it was inspired by the Netflix cash cow. I’ve seen some other websites compare this one to E.T., as well, but I don’t think that’s a terribly apt linkage — I mean, I didn’t see any of the kids in E.T take up bow and arrows and fight 30-foot-long snake monsters, did you?
The End of Oak Street is one of those movies were we already KNOW where things are headed, so a lot of the upfront build-up is kind of unnecessary. There are a ton of subplots going on 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 hasn’t and doing pizza deliveries at night, etc. It’s not like the publicity materials tried to hide the fact that it’s a dinosaur rampage movie, so why is there so much stalling during the first 45 minutes or so? Look, if you’re going to put an allosaurus on the theatrical poster, the sooner you show us the damn allosaurus the better.
You don’t want me to bore you with the specifics of the film — i.e., all the sub-subplots about the neighbors, or how exactly the prehistoric wormholes work, or what role the extinct flora plays in the movie. The weird thing, though, is that if you’re in this movie just to watch dino-carnage unfurl … you’re probably going to be disappointed.
There are two MASSIVE issues with this movie. First, since it’s rated PG-13, the actual dinosaur mayhem is quite tame — even tamer than what we see in the Jurassic Park movies. Granted, I don’t think anybody was expecting $90 million worth of Carnosaur style gore in this thing, but I did expect it to be more grim and gruesome than it was. Even when kids are getting pecked by pterodactyls and chased by the great-to-the-tenth power grandpa of the modern day saltwater crocodile the tension never really feels that tense or consequential. Despite a few bit players getting bumped off, the sense of dread and consequence in The End of Oak Street just isn’t very high.
The other major issue with the movie, and it’s a big one, are the CGI effects. Not gonna’ lie to you people, they look BAD. As in, worse than the effects we got in the first Jurassic Park movie … from 1993. It’s actually kinda amazing how crappy the visual effects are in this film compared to the industry standard just ten years ago. And when you know it’s just actors reacting to non-existent menaces in front of a green screen, it’s kinda hard to lose yourself in the moment.
Yeah, there are some good things about the film. The acting is solid, the music is nice and the attention to detail is pretty cool (say what you will, but the people who made this film DEFINITELY wanted it to feel as authentically 1982 as they could.) But once it’s all over you’re left feeling a bit cheated, and not just because the ending is way too chipper than it should be (complete with a forced pro-military message that would feel clumsily out of place even during Reagan’s first term of office.) It’s a movie with a lot of potential, but the PG-13 rating prevents it from going to a lot of places you KNOW the filmmakers wanted to go.
Like I said, though, it has its moments. My personal favorite scene? When the ailing marriage of the two main characters is salvaged after they take Polaroids of two dinosaurs doing it, uh, dinosaur style, up against one of their neighbors’ houses. Now THAT is what this movie should’ve been … WAY less The Lost World, and WAY more second season of Desperate Housewives.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, The Princess Diaries, unimpressive effects despite a mind-numbingly high budget
DIRECTOR: David Robert Mitchell
WRITER: David Robert Mitchell
STARRING: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
STUDIO: Bad Robot, Jackson Pictures
DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Picture
RUNTIME: 99 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: August 14, 2026
