Of the many lessons to be learned from David Robert Mitchell’s new genre-flexible film “The End of Oak Street,” two of the most important are as follows: Do not wear headphones during a crisis, and always listen to mom.

In essence, “The End of Oak Street” is a survival thriller dropped, like a boilermaker, into a family-friendly ’80s adventure film, for a resulting concoction that’s perpetually goofy, genuinely scary and somewhat ironically heartwarming.

The Platt family — Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) and their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — live in bucolic Flowervale, Michigan, home of summer block parties, helpful librarians, kids on bikes and low-stakes beefs between neighbors.

Behind closed doors, Greg and Denise’s marriage is rocky and the kids know it: She’s dissatisfied and writing a novel in secret, he’s lying about his work and drinking in secret. They’re fighting a lot.

That is, until a wormhole sucks a 2-mile-wide disc of their neighborhood back in time (don’t get too stuck on the logic of it, this movie sure doesn’t, thankfully) and suddenly they’re fighting for their lives against hordes of dinosaurs, furrier, featherier and scarier than we’ve seen them onscreen before.

Audrey, a big Carl Sagan fan, has an idea about how they could have gotten there but no idea how to get back. Brian worries about his dog, Starbuck.

Fractured as they are, Greg and Denise try to pull together to figure out how to protect their family from … whatever it is that’s happening. But the roles they’ve forced each other into — the optimist versus the pragmatist — still don’t jell when reassuring kids in the face of very evident disaster.

It takes true peril to break those patterns, and their kids are here to provide. Kids doing thoughtless kid things drive a lot of the film’s action (don’t wear headphones during a crisis!), compounded by Brian’s devotion to Starbuck and Audrey’s devotion to her annoying little brother.

Fighting for their lives peels back anything standing in the way of the family’s devotion to one another, which drives them through this prehistoric hellscape thanks to Greg’s doggedness and Denise’s competence, which is finally getting its due.

Bringing such terror into a suburban setting feels deeply unsettling, and Mitchell leans into that tense contrast with glee, filling our most comfortable and familiar spaces with sharp, gnashing teeth.

A goofy substratum seems to underlie even the film’s most terrifying moments, ready to cut through the tension, as if Mitchell, known for his 2014 breakout horror film ''It Follows'' and 2018’s “Under the Silver Lake,” thought to himself, “Here’s what ‘Jurassic Park’ really would have been like,” and it’s a lot more feces and also some dino fornicating.

But it’s 1982, so these poor Platts haven’t even seen “Jurassic Park”! They’re stuck with tamer reference points like “The Flintstones” and “Land of the Lost,” where dinos and humans can coexist. Not so much here on Oak Street, where most of the Platts’ neighbors have fallen to this dino massacre.

These deaths are much more gruesome than any ’80s family film would have been allowed, but we’re not in the ’80s anymore and these adventurers need to face real danger to get to their happy ending (plus, watching Anne Hathaway stab and stab and stab at the body of a multi-ton prehistoric snake is very funny).

No matter the censor standards of the day, “Oak Street” is fundamentally a story about a family’s devotion to one another, which would be eye-roll-worthy if it didn’t also feel fundamentally sincere. Yes, everything wraps up in the tidiest, unlikeliest, most convenient and happiest way possible, and stretches the filmmaking adage “save the cat” to its breaking point. Eye roll all you want, but for me it was more worthy of a good-natured groan. Like I said, don’t get too stuck on the logic.

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'THE END OF OAK STREET'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language and suggestive material)

How to watch: In theaters Aug. 14

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