#a campy shitshow indeed.......

[theliterarywolf]

How was the sequel to Tales from The Hood, a shitshow?

The original Tales from the Hood, while having some campy horror elements, still managed to present its stories and tone competently while still incorporating themes of struggles of black Americans in urban areas. 

Examples: 

A black politician who’s been trying to fight against police corruption gets beaten to death and injected with drugs post-mortem by said corrupt cops to slander his name. The politician returns from the dead to exact vengeance. Obviously this short tackles police brutality and corruption.

A little boy and his mother who are constantly beaten and abused by what he draws and identifies as a ‘monster’ who, it turns out, is the mother’s new boyfriend. The theme here is Domestic Violence and how often people try to brush it under the rug as just a way of life in the community. 

A former klansman-turned senator buys a building called ‘The Dollhouse’ that is of high historical significance to the local black community, despite their wishes and complaints, to serve as the headquarters for his racist campaign to become governor. The house in of itself was where a confederate-supporter, after the loss of the Civil War, decided to murder all of his slaves rather than see them freed. Their restless souls haunted the place until a ‘voodoo woman’ managed to calm their souls and place them into dolls. You can pretty much guess where this is going and the themes.

The final entry centers around a gang-member who, after getting hunted and shot down by rival gang-members, is taken into police custody and is given one last chance for freedom by a doctor’s new, radical behavioral therapy program. Said therapy takes a note right out of A Clockwork Orange and bombards our main character with alternating images of brutal gang-violence and KKK lynchings. After which, he is berated with apparitions of all the people he’s shot and killed; including a little girl who was a victim during one of his drive-by shootings. Of course, this kind of therapy will only be successful if the subject shows some remorse...

And all of this is wrapped in a framing device of three gang-members trying to find some drugs at a funeral-home, even harassing the funeral-director, which turns out to be a portal into hell.

... *deep breath*

I have to do a ‘Read More’ because this post got long. But I implore you guys to read on to see the abyss of insanity and bad directions that were taken in regards to the sequel of this movie. Please.

The sequel decided to throw ALL NUANCE AND TACT out of the window and give us such wonderful stories as: 

A white girl and a black girl are on a road-trip and decide to go to the... ugh... Museum of Negrosity where the owner chastises them on thinking that the uncomfortable racist memorabilia he owns (collections of minstrel show cartoons, golliwog and pickaninny dolls) are things of the past instead of acknowledging them as parts of America’s racist past. And, for some reason, the white girl is obsessed with buying one of the golliwog dolls because she had one when she was little. Anyway, they sneak back in later with the white girl’s brother who happens to be the black girl’s boyfriend, so they can steal one of the dolls. Through hijinks, the doll comes to life and grows to the size of a human being. The brother/boyfriend gets whipped to death, the black girl gets cut in half by a minstrel-colored guillotine, and the white girl... Fucks the giant golliwog doll, gets pregnant, and a few days later, has her stomach torn open as a bunch of baby versions of the doll go flying out everywhere.

Some gang-members track down a former pimp who’s changed his ways to try and shake him down for some owed money. He doesn’t comply, so they kill him but, golly-gee! How are they going to get the money now~? Oh, I know! Hold a scam medium hostage so he can perform a seance to talk to the pimp to find out about the money. But, oh no~ It looks like the medium’s powers decide to actually work this time~ Ooh~

Two douchebags hookup with two hot chicks and, after the world’s worst game of Cards Against Humanity, they decide to roofie the girls so they can record themselves raping them so they can post it to ‘le dark web’. ... Lo’ and behold, the girls turn out to be vampires who were playing 4D chess to rope the two douchebags in so they can use them for their own recording-something-brutal-to-post-online scheme. 

And... The LAST one. Oh my God, the LAST ONE. *deep breath* Okay.

So we follow a black republican councilman who is married to a white woman and they’re expecting a baby after a long line of miscarriages. But the wife is having weird bouts of bad dreams and insomnia. What are the bad dreams about? 

... I need you guys to understand. That I am not shitposting when I type the following words. *deep breath* Okay. 

The wife is being haunted by the ghost of Emmett Till telling her that she doesn’t deserve to have her baby. You know? Emmett Till? The victim of one of the most brutal, horrific murders in America due to one of the most disgusting, vile acts of racism? THAT EMMETT TILL?!

So..! The black councilman is working for a white politician who... I’m just going to put a direct quote from the movie so you can get where they were coming from.

“That man wants to close down ten more voting locations, all of them in black districts!”

Anyway, after a house-call from a doctor who brushes off the dreams as hormones, the councilman hosts a party for the politician who’s running slogan is ‘Let’s take Mississippi back!’ Gee-golly-willickers! Can’t imagine where they were coming from with that one!!

So the party goes on, the politician even congratulating our councilman on his ‘white wife’, but said wife rushes downstairs after having another dream; ranting about ‘that boy from the field has decided to LIVE! And if he lives, our baby’s going to die!’ And she runs outside with a machete to try and kill the ghost of Emmett Till (who, again, very real person and victim of racist brutality). 

So the councilman’s mother and the local voodoo expert drive up and the voodoo expert tells the councilman that Emmett Till is trying to talk to him about the nature of sacrifice. The next day, the wife is talking about how her stomach is getting smaller, but the councilman doesn’t want to hear any of it and calls the doctor again. And, guys..?! If shit hadn’t jumped the rails before?! The train just starts doing cartwheels from here. 

The doctor is suspiciously short-tempered with the politician this time around and he does examine the wife to confirm that her stomach is indeed shrinking. However, when he’s told that the councilman is the father, he storms out and snaps “I don’t work for coloreds!” 

Then the wife runs out of bed and tells the doctor that the councilman isn’t her husband and that he kidnapped and raped her. So both the wife and the doctor drive off and the councilman realizes that the world has somehow gone back to the era of Jim Crow. 

... Oooh my gosh, typing this is making me want to commit toaster-bath but it gets so much worse..!

So, after the voodoo expert comes to chastise the councilman about not ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to you’, he is able to see the ghost of Emmett Till (who was a real person, why is this happening..?!) who is there to tell him that he’s decided that he wants to live. Which means that the world will never see the brutal images of his body at his funeral and that will cause a Butterfly Effect in history that will make it so that the Civil Rights Movement never happened. 

You may be questioning the logistics of this, but don’t worry! The ghosts of the girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham come to explain and further berate the councilman about ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to him’ and working for a racist politician. 

But wait! There’s more! *whines* I keep crying out to God but he won’t answer...

They’re soon joined by the ghosts of the three Freedom Riders who were killed during the Mississippi Burning Murders, the ghost of Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers, and DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 

Not to mention several other unnamed figures who walk up while everyone else starts chanting about ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to you’, who look like Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass, just to name a few. 

... I need a drink. I need a cold, stiff drink. ... Almost done. 

So, in comes the Klan. You know, the white-robed bastards; I hear they have an outreach center a few cities away from me. Sure, fine, whatever. The wife is leading them along with the white politician who hits the councilman’s mother in the face with a baton and Emmett Till stops time just as reinforcements show up to tell the councilman that, in order for everything to go back to normal, he has to join the ranks of those who sacrificed. 

“If what you want is worth us dying for, how come its not worth you dying for?!”

And, at first, the councilman disagrees; even being dragged away by Klansmen. However! It’s his wife angrily spitting in his face that makes him realize that this world isn’t the world he wants to live in. So he runs over to Emmett Till to tell him that he will join him... And then he’s beaten to death, becoming a sacrifice to get the world back to normal. And, once it is, his spirit joins Emmett Till’s and walks off into the great beyond. 

So! Not only did this schlocky, B-movie horror movie sequel decide to use a REAL LIFE VICTIM of racism-driven brutality as a story-device, but it also wants to put forth the message that the people who lost their lives during the Civil Rights Movement? Yeah, they HAD to die! Otherwise the Civil Rights Movement would never have happened~!

You see why I hate the sequel to Tales from the Hood so much? Not even mentioning the terrible framing segments of a racial-profiling robot being told these stories so it knows what ‘criminals’ to go after, but this movie is just a temple of ‘WHY?! WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!?!?!’

#Anonymous #replies

[indigoire]

It Read-through Chapters One and Two, “After the Flood” and “After the Festival”

Starting off strong with child death! Yaaaay! 

Warning for gore, death, homophobia, hate crimes, sewer clowns, and juvenile humor. 

Explanation of what I’m doing here.

The first chapter is pretty much exactly like the first part of the 2017 movie, with a few very key differences. 

For one, Bill is a few years younger here than he is in the first movie. In the movie the kids are around thirteen or so and they make note of this a couple times. In this Bill is only ten, therefore he’s eleven for the rest of the child half of the novel. Georgie is still only six. 

For another, when Pennywise attacks Georgie he doesn’t drag Georgie into the sewers, and the neighbors respond to his screams almost immediately. It’s outright stated that forty-five seconds after Georgie’s first scream a man named Dave Gardener finds Georgie’s body, already dead, arm torn from its socket. People run outside when they hear the scream, they witness Georgie by the storm drain, they know of the attack. In the movie he’s “gone missing”, largely presumed dead, but here Bill and his family know from the outset that Georgie is dead and died violently at that. There is a mention by King that the town tends to get through terrible events and then pretend they never happened in order to get over them, and I think in the film they made this more overt by having the few neighbors around ignore what happens to Georgie. 

I feel like for the sake of the liveblog I should go over what happens in the book for the unaware, but it almost feels superfluous for this first chapter. Everyone knows Georgie dies at the hands of Pennywise, at the claws of It. Even the book lets it slip very early on that Georgie is slated for death, only a few paragraphs in. 

Let’s rewind and properly explain. The book begins with George Denbrough running after a newspaper boat in the rain. George, or Georgie as he is affectionately called, is the younger brother of Bill Denbrough, one of our main characters, if not the leading man. Bill is sick with the flu, so he can’t go and play with Georgie in the rain, but he builds the kid a paper boat all the same, and seals it with paraffin wax to keep it watertight. A lot of the first chapter is devoted to two things: showing the bond Bill and his brother share, and showing that Georgie is already somewhat aware of It’s presence. 

Bill sends Georgie down to the cellar to get the wax, and Georgie goes, but with extreme trepidation. He pictures monsters waiting to snatch him up in the cellar, and King here goes in depth into the smell of the cellar, a smell of “dirt and wet and long-gone vegetables”, the stink of rot, which is the smell of the monster, “the smell of It, crouched and lurking and ready to spring. A creature which would eat anything but which was especially hungry for boymeat.”

Yep. “Boymeat”. Right up there with “manflesh” in terms of descriptive vocabulary. 

But basically, on some level, Georgie knows there’s something lurking in the dark for him, and he knows it’s a childish fear but he can’t quite shake his instinct. 

Sidenote: there’s a reference to the Turtle fairly early on! Georgie finds a flat can of Turtle wax, and stares at the logo for a good thirty seconds. Which, by the way, probably looked like this: 

Anyways, Georgie finds the paraffin wax and runs up the stairs, fearing that something lurking in the dark will grab him by his shirttail and yank him down, but he escapes and goes to give the wax to Bill. 

Just a personal note here, when I initially tried to read this book some ten years ago I rolled my eyes at the conversation between the two brothers, which I remember distinctly being about buttholes, who was the biggest butthole, etc. I mean, they’re kids, it’s juvenile humor, what ya gonna do. The version I have downloaded here has the kids calling each other “a-holes”. So now I have to wonder if my version got censored somehow. Anyways. Nothing to inspire confidence in the rest of the novel like a conversation about who’s the biggest asshole between kids. 

The brothers do have an oddly tender moment, which they both note is out of character for them, with Georgie kissing Bill’s cheek goodbye and Bill telling him to be careful. It seems like they know instinctively that they’re never going to see each other again. 

Georgie runs out to play with his boat, and he chases it happily through the street until it unfortunately goes down a storm drain. Georgie tries to see if he can get it, but only sees yellow eyes staring back, until said eyes solidify as a clown. Georgie describes the clown as a cross between Bozo the Clown and Clarabell from Howdy Doody (both, for the record, are the most terrifying clowns I’ve ever seen, dear lord), but King notes that if Georgie “had been inhabiting a later year” he would have thought of Ronald McDonald first. 

Just real quick gonna throw these nightmares up on screen for y’all:

Thanks, I hate it. 

Here Pennywise introduces himself as Mr Bob Gray, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, so right off the bat there’s some differences. Georgie asks himself how he could have seen yellow eyes when Pennywise’s eyes are a “bright, dancing blue” like his mother’s or Bill’s eyes. 

Like the 2017 movie, Pennywise says the storm blew him and the circus into the sewer, and asks Georgie if he can smell the circus. Georgie can indeed, but he does notice the cellar smell lurking underneath, the smell of wet and rot. 

But he ignores it. 

Instead the clown offers him a balloon and Georgie asks “do they float?” 

And the second he reaches his hand out to grab a balloon, Pennywise latches on, Georgie screams, and knows no more. 

“They float,” it growled, “they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too—”

It’s noted that Georgie watches the clown’s face change, and what he sees destroys his sanity “in one clawing stroke”. 

So really it’s a good thing that he dies a few moments later after It wrenches his arm off. 

Again, Georgie’s body is found within the minute by a neighbor, and other neighbors run over to see what’s going on. 

The chapter ends with a description of the paper boat floating through the sewers of Derry, as Bill’s family is delivered the news and his mother is sedated for shock in the ER, and “perhaps it reached the sea, and sails there forever, like a magic boat in a fairytale”. 

Sweet sentiment. I’m getting all choked up over here. 🙄

So I figured I’d read on to the next chapter, seeing as the first chapter is so short and so well known. 

God, I wished I had left it at one chapter. 

The next chapter is told through a series of interviews with the witness and suspects to the case of the murder of Adrian Mellon. 

It’s a fucking shitshow of a chapter.

It is DEEPLY homophobic. Every word of it. 

This is how we’re introduced to Don Hagarty, partner to Adrian and key witness to his murder: “This man—if you want to call him a man—was wearing lipstick and satin pants so tight you could almost read the wrinkles in his cock.”

COME ON, STEPHEN. 

Now. I know very very well that this book was published in 1986 and America was not kind to queer people in the eighties. I know that King was capturing that homophobia, not necessarily homophobic himself, and that his viewpoints have probably changed. 

That said, reading this chapter was like a punch in the stomach every few sentences. The cops who interrogate the men responsible for the hate crime against Adrian make it clear that they are both disgusted by the attackers and deeply homophobic themselves. They all say at some point “I don’t like fairies, I don’t care for queers, they’re hardly men” in varying forms of intensity. 

I honestly think I blacked this chapter out when I was seventeen, I don’t remember it being like this. Or maybe I didn’t care so much a decade ago, closeted and repressed, and that’s a scary realization. That your own internalized homophobia might have been so pervasive that you don’t see it in others. That it sounds reasonable when a supposedly sympathetic character says he hopes the murdering homophobes get locked up, prison raped, and get AIDS. 

Sigh.

To sum up: Adrian Mellon is attacked while out with his boyfriend, Don. A group of young men, having been teased by Adrian at the Canal Days festival (though Adrian here makes a blowjob joke, not a shitty haircut joke--he’s too good for this book really), claim that they attacked out of “civic pride” because Adrian was wearing a “I ❤️ Derry” hat. One of the attackers tells Don to get out of there, and he screams for help. The attackers push Adrian over the side of the Kissing Bridge. The attacker who saves Don, Chris, sees Pennywise, and so does Don a little bit later, and they tell the cops that interrogate them. The cops dismiss the clown, at first ostensibly because the witnesses are hysterical, but then later in the chapter it’s revealed that the police don’t want the attacker’s lawyers jumping on the clown thing to prove their clients’ innocence. So Pennywise, even having been seen by two witnesses, is left off the record entirely. 

King also reveals the deeply, deeply homophobic sentiment in the town, the violent anti-gay graffiti all over public property, at the Kissing Bridge or in the public park, the people in the town outright ignoring the attack as it’s happening, the fact that the one gay bar in town is home to some very fearful people who just want to keep their heads down. 

So yes, you can extrapolate that the homophobic stuff expressed in the book is to show that Derry is a hateful place where fear festers and so forth...

But King also goes out of his way to emasculate Don Hagarty and Adrian Mellon every chance he gets, effusing about the dramatic makeup they wear, the nail polish, the bright outfits, the campy attitudes. Adrian is described as five-foot-five and slight. Don is described as shrill and dramatic (his BOYFRIEND was just BRUTALLY MURDERED). Meanwhile the homophobes are described as looking like Bruce Springsteen. Like. 

I really feel for Don, I do, despite the book’s best attempts to make him a walking caricature, a huge gay joke. He says Derry’s like “a dead strumpet with maggots squirming out of her cooze”. He calls Derry a sewer. He’s right on both counts.

Well. On that cheerful note, time to wrap this read-through up! Tune in next time for our introduction to Stan (and probably the last time we’ll see grown-up Stan :D). 

Bye for now.

#IT #It (book) #It (novel) #Stephen King's IT #Stephen King #IT Readthrough #I'm uhh not looking forward to the next chapter tbh #I saw the title and I know what's coming and it's not pretty