Tag Archives: horror anthology movies

New In Theaters

Freaks Off the Leash

Leave a comment

Freaky Tales

by George Wolf

Look, I’m not saying I didn’t expect someone to make a Sleepy-Floyd-as-a-ninja-assassin horror comedy. I am saying I didn’t expect it to be Boden and Fleck.

Eric “Sleepy” Floyd played thirteen years in the NBA, making the All Star team in 1987 as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Freaky Tales makes him the heroic centerpiece of a wild anthology that loves the late 80s, Oakland, and Nazis dying some horrible deaths.

Let’s party!

Ryan Fleck may be an Oakland native, but his films with partner Anna Boden haven’t primed us for this campy, Grindhouse detour. Breaking in with the standout indie dramas Half Nelson and Sugar, they moved closer to the mainstream with the road tripping gamblers of Mississippi Grind before giving Captain Marvel a satisfying MCU debut in 2019.

Freaky Tales feels like a return to a low budget indie mindset, where ambitious and energetic newcomers want to showcase their favorite movies, music, and neighborhoods while they splatter blood and blow shit up.

The tone is set in the first of four chapters, when local skinheads make a habit of busting up a punk club. Pushed too far, the young, pierced pacifists decide to take bloody revenge with the help of a Scott Pilgrim aesthetic and a glowing green substance seemingly from another world.

Episodes two and three back off on the bloodletting, but begin interconnecting the tales with shared characters. A racist cop (Ben Mendelsohn) harasses two ice cream shop clerks (Normani, Dominique Thorne) before they get the chance to battle rap star Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver, although the real rapper is also in the cast) onstage at a local hip hop club.

Meanwhile, an organized crime enforcer on the way to losing all he cares about (Pedro Pascal) disappoints a snobbish video rental guy (Tom Hanks in a fun cameo) while references to Sleepy Floyd (Insecure‘s Jay Ellis) get more and more frequent.

Part four brings everything together in an explosion of Metallica metal and Tarrantino-esque alternative history, with Floyd slicing up enough bad guys to impress Uma Thurman before breaking out the break dancing that runs beside the closing credits.

If you haven’t guessed, this is a crazy ride that has plenty to offer fans of bloody fun and WTF plot turns. And while the middle chapters sometimes tread water compared with the action splatter of parts one and four, give Boden and Fleck credit for throwing us one we didn’t see coming.

Buried under all this blood and camp, the film displays a genuine love of time, place and genre that you cannot ignore. These Freaky Tales are truly off the leash, usually in the best possible way.

New In Theaters

Ave Satán

Leave a comment

Satanic Hispanics

by Hope Madden

For genre fans, a well-made anthology can be a delight. Sometimes, like Michael Dougherty’s classic Trick ‘r Treat, one filmmaker pieces together a set of related short works. More often, though, a framing story connects the tales of many different filmmakers. The Mortuary Collection is an example of a recent gem.

Satanic Hispanics falls into the second category. It’s a collection of shorts made by Latinx filmmakers. Like, really good filmmakers. Eduardo Sánchez instigated the entire found footage phenomenon with his genre classic The Blair Witch Project. Gigi Saul Guerrero delivered geriatric fun in her 2021 film Bingo Hell. Demián Rugna’s Terrified is a haunting and effective flick, and Alejandro Brugués’s Juan of the Dead is the most underseen and brilliant film of the lot.

There’s good reason to be excited about the potential of the shorts assembled for Satanic Hispanics. And, on the whole, these filmmakers deliver on that promise.

Mike Mendez (Gravedancers) starts us out with the framing story, “The Traveler.” It introduces the titular character (Efren Ramirez, Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro), the last man standing at a crime scene where 27 are dead. As he’s interrogated by two well-meaning detectives, he shares tales meant to persuade them that a great evil is coming.

Those stories range from Rugna’s creepy and trippy “También Lo Vi” to Sánchez’s comedic “El Vampiro” to Guerrero’s creature feature, “Nahuales”, to the Brugués insanity, “Hammer of Zanzibar.” Each has its charms, and every genre fan will find at least one or two films to take their fancy.

Rugna’s mindbender about light refraction, algorithms and inadvertently opening a portal to something sinister is the standout. Brugués delivers a stylized comedic adventure – part Tarantino, part Evil Dead. And if you can get past the troubling fact that a jilted boyfriend beats his ex-girlfriend with a giant penis for laughs, you might like it. 

But the collection absolutely boasts some inspired talent having a blast, and when is that ever a bad thing to witness?