Yeah, you can find all kinds of crazy stuff on Tubi if you just go looking. I think this one is on my poster, but man…it’s a crazy title at the very least.
Sadly, the title seems to be the craziest thing about this movie.
On night, three drug dealers go to a mortuary to get some drugs from the eccentric owner Mr. Simms (Clarence Williams III). Simms is, easily, the best part of the movie, but I am getting ahead of myself. Regardless, Simms opts to tell the trio stories about some of the dead folks in his funeral home rather than get the drugs the three guys want right away. The stories revolve around an African American activist getting back at the racist cops who killed him on the one year anniversary, a boy who fears the monster that is his mother’s boyfriend, a former Klansman running for governor trying to take care of dolls possessed by the spirits of dead slaves, and a gang member sent to what looks like the Clockwork Orange school of criminal reform. There’s a twist ending to each of the stories, as there is at the end of the movie when Simms drops a bomb on his three guests that they didn’t see coming.
Now, as an anthology, a movie like this is only as good or as bad as the stories in it. This is a horror-comedy, so it should be at least a little funny and/or a little scary. Sadly, it’s mostly neither. I didn’t even think most of the twists were all that good, and many of the special effects, particularly a morphing effect in the last minute or so of the movie, have all aged rather poorly save one that involved David Alan Grier getting folded like a piece of paper.
Ultimately, I just felt like everything I saw in this movie is something I had seen somewhere else. Like its namesake the Tales from the Crypt TV anthology series, a host character sets up a story where an awful person gets what he deserves, along with maybe some other folks who didn’t quite deserve what happened but it hit them anyway. But if the horror comedy is neither scary nor funny, what is it? Well, it’s the kind of movie that can maybe spawn some sequels, perhaps on the strength of the Mr. Simms character alone. I mean, Williams seems to be having fun, and his character has a lot more personality than anyone else in the movie, owing in equal parts his performance and the extra care given to him in the script.
That’s something of a shame. There’s no reason why this particular subgenre can’t have African American representation, one reflecting perhaps the fears and concerns that they have that are lost on others. And maybe this movie resonates more with other people than it did with me. I mean, it did spawn two sequels so far, with Williams’s death last year perhaps being the one thing that will stop another from being made. But this one here isn’t funny or scary, and the special effects haven’t aged all that well. I just think it would have to be a lot better to live up to whatever promise the title suggests.
Grade: C-
0 Comments