Parents' Guide to The End of Oak Street

It has a fun premise—and is somewhat enjoyable if you turn off your brain—but this sci-fi thriller is ultimately too familiar, with characters who are too skimpy to really care about. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell first landed on the map thanks to his superior horror movie It Follows, but he suffered a bit of a slump with the offbeat Under the Silver Lake. Now, working with producer J.J. Abrams, he's turned The End of Oak Street into a mega-Spielberg tribute. (Abrams previously tried this, with mixed results, with Super 8.) The movie is specifically set in 1982, the year that Spielberg explored the underside of U.S. suburbia in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. And then, 11 years later in 1993, he released Jurassic Park, giving moviegoers dinosaurs the likes of which they'd never seen before.

Well, now we've seen them before, especially after a seemingly never-ending series of Jurassic sequels. There's really not much more anyone can do with them, although Mitchell gives viewers a large, icky eel-like beast (whose length changes depending on the scene) that may haunt some nightmares. As for the characters, they don't do much more than argue and wander around the neighborhood looking for one another and their wayward dog. They're pushed by the plot rather than driving it. At one point, Denise suggests that they should stockpile food, water, and weapons, but do they ever do that? Nope. Certainly there have been worse movies and TV shows about prehistoric beasts, and some viewers might enjoy the carnage of The End of Oak Street, but, for a high-concept movie, it's pretty uninspired.