The End of Oak Street

J.J. Abrams’ love of Spielberg-brand blockbuster cinema is no secret. He’s spoken at length about Spielberg’s influence as a filmmaker and mentor. As the story goes, after a Super-8 contest in 1982, at age 15, Abrams and his childhood friend Matt Reeves received a call from Spielberg to restore three of the filmmaker’s own early movies. Many years later, Abrams teamed with Spielberg’s production company Amblin on his personal homage to the director’s sensibilities in the deliriously fun Super 8 (2011), about a bunch of kids shooting a homemade zombie movie only to witness a captive alien escape from a fiery train derailment. For his latest nod to Spielberg, Abrams serves as producer for writer-director David Robert Mitchell, who broke out with It Follows (2014), a formative entry in the independent horror scene. For their collaboration on The End of Oak Street, Abrams and Mitchell drop the archetypal ’80s suburban neighborhood—established in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and copied countless times from there—into the middle of Jurassic Park (1993). The result is terrific (and mercifully short), delivering a compact summer blockbuster with thrills and heart to spare.

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