"Oakland was hella freaky." That's the tagline of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's California-hazy thriller Freaky Tales, a social-savvy anthology about 1987 Oakland—with a supernatural bent. The film loves to throw around the word "freaky," whether rap battles or wraparound narrations, but the film's problem is the overpromise of genre elements. Boden and Fleck tackle racism, Nazis, predatory law enforcement, and a host of other injustices throughout for stories connected by neon-green thunderbolts in the sky, but it's an exhaustingly flat marathon of inconsequentiality. Stories are desperately linear while genre elements make no sense in context, like a haphazard take on Tromaville that's somehow less sensical.

Freaky Tales is a story of punk rockers defending their concert venue, ice cream scoopers who dabble as verbal assassins, a debt collector pulled back into the business (Pedro Pascal), and NBA All-Star Sleepy Floyd (played by Jay Ellis). They're overlapping stories with interconnection spread like a web,...