Tales From the Crypt, Season 3, Episode 10: "Mournin' Mess"
The pandemic-themed horror movie we all have the misfortune to be living right now is not at all subtle in its commentary regarding race and class. COVID-19 only highlights the terrible price those on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder have to pay for our brutal iniquities.
The working poor often face an impossible choice: death, disease or paralyzing unemployment and even homelessness. African-Americans have been disproportionately represented in COVID-19 illnesses and deaths and it has become achingly apparent that Trump and his minions are more than willing to sacrifice the lives and health of the poor for the sake of a booming economy for the rich.
The current pandemic and terror and class tension that goes along with it lends a contemporary resonance to “Mournin’ Mess”, a fright fable about the haves not just feasting on the resources of the have-nots but their bodies as well.
It’s an episode that gets all the little things right, that nails all the details, beginning with the first casualty of its homeless serial killer, an ex-boxer nicknamed Dancer played by Stack Pierce. Pierce doesn’t have much time onscreen; his entire role wraps up in less than a minute, but that’s all it takes for Pierce to leave an indelible impression, to create a character with a sense of life and history despite having next to no dialogue. Dancer may be a homeless man and a victim of bloodthirsty monsters, but he’s a human being with dignity first and foremost.
Steven Weber is typecast agreeably as Dale Sweeney, a duplicitous newshound first seen coldly ejecting his latest one-night stand from his apartment. He’s an unrepentant bastard, a womanizer who seduces a bevy of beauties, then dumps them once they’re no longer of use to him.
The dogged newsman is a bit of a ghoul himself, an ambitious professional parasite who perpetually prizes professional success over people. He’s such a bastard that when he shows up for work late yet again his boss Elaine Tillman (Ally Walker, in a nicely nasty supporting turn) does nothing to hide her delight in getting to fire him.
In his capacity as a journalist, Dale investigates a seemingly benevolent organization called Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaway Society whose initials (G.H.O.U.L.S) betray their true nature. The Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaway Society puts on an attractive front, literally, through super-slick spokeswoman Jess Gilchrist (Rita Wilson) but any organization with that acronym is clearly up to no good, as evidenced by a string of murders afflicting the homeless community.
Vincent Schiavelli, a character actor seemingly made for a show like Tales From the Crypt, costars as Robert, a homeless man suspected of being a prolific serial killer of homeless people who encourages Dale to go behind the scenes of Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaway Society to find the real killer of the city’s homeless population.
As his personal and professional fortunes nosedive, the gulf between the cocky reporter and the homeless people he’s reporting on begins to narrow, particularly after he loses both his job and his home. Dale ends up at the Grateful Homeless cemetery, where he digs up a grave and finds himself lost in a series of underground tunnels filled with skulls and bones and other elements of the recently and not so recently diseased.
It takes our intrepid newfound nearly the entire episode to figure out what savvy viewers, and even non-savvy viewers will figure out almost immediately: that the Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaway Society is a gaggle of literal ghouls who feast on the flesh of the homeless outcasts they profess to serve.
Dale ends up on the main course for one of their killer dinners, just another broke and desperate member of the working class devoured by monsters who remove their human disguises to reveal Nosferatu-like visages of pure evil, even the previously foxy Jess.
““Mournin’ Mess” is almost impressively unsurprising. The name of the organization at the heart of the episode is nowhere near as clever as the show thinks it is, or clever at all, for that matter. Nor is the episode particularly scary. It’s less laugh out loud funny than darkly humorous but it succeeds all the same due to its richly observed milieu and timely element of social commentary.
The not so fine folks behind the Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaway Society at least have the decency to try to hide their evil aims behind a facade of philanthropy and public service. In our world Alex Jones literally tells his audience of this pandemic, “I’ll admit it. I will eat my neighbors … I’m just gonna be honest … I’m literally looking at my neighbors now going ‘Am I ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up?' and you know what, I’m ready … I’ll eat my neighbors ... I’ll eat your ass, I will.”
When it comes to true monstrousness, the literal ghouls of G.H.O.U.L.S have nothing on the media monsters of our own diseased digital age.
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