‘Shaky Shivers’ Clip – Grab Some Ice Cream…and a Curse!
Shudder Nabs Tribeca Horror ‘You’ll Never Find Me’
‘RoboDoc’ Clip Remembers Film’s Lightning-In-a-Bottle Blockbuster Release
New Screams Alert: ‘The History of Metal and Horror’ Doc is Now Available on SCREAMBOX
Cellar Dwellers: How ‘The People Under the Stairs’ Shaped ‘Barbarian’ and ‘Cobweb’
Watch the “Gen V” Orientation Video For Godolkin University!
First Look at Hulu’s Paranormal “Living for the Dead” Series
“Chucky” Season 3 Will Be Split Into Two; Episodes to Resume in 2024
‘RoboDoc’ Clip Remembers Film’s Lightning-In-a-Bottle Blockbuster Release
“Chucky” Season 3 – Full Trailer Promises the Bloodiest Halloween Yet!
‘Riddle of Fire’ TIFF Review – A Throwback to Children’s Quest Narratives
‘Sleep’ TIFF Review – Sleepwalking Turns Horrifying for New Parents
‘Dream Scenario’ TIFF Review – Nightmare Comedy Transforms Nicolas Cage Into Dream Boogeyman for Cancel Culture Commentary
‘Working Class Goes to Hell’ TIFF Review – A Class Critique Without Bite
‘When Evil Lurks’ TIFF Review – ‘Terrified’ Director Demián Rugna Doles Out Violent Possession Shocker
Cellar Dwellers: How ‘The People Under the Stairs’ Shaped ‘Barbarian’ and ‘Cobweb’
Five Sci-Fi Horror Movies Featuring Aliens to Stream This Week
Forces of Nature: The Power of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ 60 Years Later
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master’ at 35 – A Highlight Reel of Classic Freddy Moments
6 Things We’d Love to See in Future ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Video Game Updates
‘Shaky Shivers’ Clip – Grab Some Ice Cream…and a Curse!
Watch the “Gen V” Orientation Video For Godolkin University!
‘RoboDoc’ Clip Remembers Film’s Lightning-In-a-Bottle Blockbuster Release
“Chucky” Season 3 – Full Trailer Promises the Bloodiest Halloween Yet!
Latest ‘DREDGE’ Update Adds Paint Customization, New Crustaceans and More [Trailer]
Limited Run Games Adds Sega Genesis Titles to ‘Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection’
Latest ‘DREDGE’ Update Adds Paint Customization, New Crustaceans and More [Trailer]
Atari’s ‘Haunted House’ Reimagining Arrives October 12 for PC, Consoles [Trailer]
‘Hades II’ Expected in Early Access in Q2 2024
Halloween Update for ‘Amnesia: The Bunker’ to Introduce Shell Shocked Mode
Published
on
By
HBO created the first adult animated series in 1997, but Spicy City, a dark cyberpunk anthology from Ralph Bakshi, has become a lost relic.
Animation is one of the most versatile mediums of storytelling and over the past decade it’s been able to shake the restricting baggage that animated content is purely for younger audiences. Animated series for adults are among some of the best dramas and comedies on television, especially those that lean into the limitlessness of the medium. Animated series like Primal, Castlevania, and Love, Death + Robots have been groundbreaking horror series that show what’s truly possible in animation. The abundance of streaming services means that ancient programs have been unearthed to “complete” certain streaming libraries and it’s always exciting when new audiences can experience older content, even those that are products of their time.
HBO Max has the majority of HBO’s original series since the cable network’s inception, but there are still a handful of series–Tales From the Crypt among them–that are unable to stream. A lesser-known HBO original is Spicy City, a six-episode science fiction/cyberpunk anthology series that was masterminded by animation savant Ralph Bakshi, is also unavailable to stream on HBO Max (although it can be watched on archive.org). There is surely less outcry to add Spicy City to HBO Max’s library, but the dark show holds a special place in history as the first animated series that’s specifically for adults. Spicy City is a fascinating anomaly that’s even more interesting to examine 25 years later.
The 1990s were a revolutionary period for animation that definitively marked the public’s acceptance of “cartoons” as a medium that can entertain adults. Disney animated films were still viewed as the norm, but a small ripple that would eventually turn into a tidal wave started to form when a video Christmas card–of all things–started to gain traction. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Jesus vs. Santa crude video short made its way through film and television executives’ mailboxes and this unconventional approach to seasons’ greetings would become the impetus for Comedy Central’s South Park. Comedy Central’s development on an adult-animated series caused a serious stir in the television industry. 
One of the stranger chain reactions of South Park’s development is that HBO would rush into production their own animated series, Spicy City, just so they could technically claim the credit for having the “first animated series targeted specifically towards adults.” Spicy City technically accomplished this goal and aired one month before South Park, on July 11, 1997. That being said, the fates of these two series could not be more different and the irony on the matter is rich enough that Spicy City’s bittersweet and short-lived “victory” could be the karmic resolution for one of its own episodes. Spicy City “wins” the war, but it comes and goes in a single season of six episodes whereas South Park is still on the air 25 years later. It comes across as quite amateurish in the larger pantheon of science fiction and cyberpunk anthology series, animated or otherwise.
The only other comparable animated series on television during the 1990s was MTV’s Liquid Television, which actually feels quite in sync with many of the ideas explored in Spicy City, especially its cyberpunk noir story, “Tears of a Clone.” There’s also Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, which curiously started its three-season run on HBO in May of 1997, predating Spicy City. However, Spawn’s comic book roots and teen demographic seem to preclude it from fitting into the “adult animation” category, despite its clearly mature language and brutal subject matter. HBO considers Spicy City to hold this honor instead of Spawn, but their production of both of these series in the ’90s speaks to their desire to push animation to new places.
Each episode of Spicy City is introduced by Raven, a buxom nightclub hostess who’s able to distill these macabre tales of science fiction into tidy lessons. Spicy City doesn’t always work, but it continually feels like an animated series for adults, for both better and for worse. Ultra-sexed DDD-breasted heroines fill up the frame and Spicy City showcases sex a lot more than it does violence, but there’s still gratuitous gore that the series doesn’t avoid. More often than not the series’ animation looks like a Saturday morning cartoon version of sexy science fiction stories, which pulls Spicy City in two directions. It’s clearly geared for adults, but so often the character designs and action sequences feel like they pull staples from kids’ cartoons.
It’s telling that Spicy City had a brief syndication window in 2002 on Canada’s Teletoon late-night animation block, which was geared towards teens, not adults. In fact, the overseas animation for Spicy City was handled by Koko Enterprises (then Ko Ko Entertainment), who worked on Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League, as well as kid-centric animated programming like Freakazoid!, Animaniacs, and Histeria!
Spicy City’s first episode, “Love is a Download,” is a VR love story that feels like the type of tale that one would find in Black Mirror. This premiere actually tells a rather prescient story about getting too attached to a VR world and those who spend more time in a simulation than reality and increasingly lose their grip, more than a decade earlier than Ready Player One. The animation in the virtual reality world leaves a lot to be desired and it’s quite jarring to see Flash-level visuals catering to adult audiences on HBO, no less. It’s so counterintuitive to how the medium now works. It’s possible that Spicy City also thought that aesthetics weren’t the most important element to draw in audiences because of South Park’s ability to turn its rudimentary visuals into its secret weapon. The problem is that South Park still has subversive writing and original ideas behind the crude animation and humor. Spicy City, on the other hand, only has the semblance of science fiction and genre storytelling to lean back on, which often isn’t enough to keep audiences engaged throughout these six episodes.
It’s a real misfire that the least visually appealing episode is what kicks off the series. It’s entirely possible that it gave audiences the wrong idea of what the typical episode of Spicy City would look like. This pilot is also directed by John Kafka, who has a reputation in anime, but not on the adult side of things. Kafka cut his teeth in the animation department for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and directed disposable children’s series like Dino Babies and Danger Rangers. Arguably, the animator’s greatest claim to fame was directing the direct-to-video Cinderella sequel, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. It doesn’t seem as if Kafka quite rises to the challenge in Spicy City.
“Mano’s Hands” finds a premise that’s actually interesting and effectively highlights the dangers of obsession and how it can take over people’s lives. The episode creates genuine pathos for a disembodied hand and there’s a very Baby’s Day Out slapstick quality, but with hands. If nothing else, there are no other anthology series that tell this story. “Manos’ Hands” also predates Idle Hands, the premier evil hand movie, by several years.
“Tears of a Clone” tells a film noir detective story about a man’s missing “daughter,” which suddenly takes on more sinister developments. The episode gets into questions of identity and the difference between an original and a replica, if any, as it comments upon the expendable nature of organic bodies and humanity’s need to evolve beyond their natural forms. This episode also includes the series’ strongest protagonist and if Spicy City had continued it’s not hard to picture future detective stories that return to this hard-boiled character. “Tears of a Clone” includes some gorgeous visuals of Spicy City’s sprawling futuristic world and the series’ art design is a consistent highlight throughout the series even when the writing falls flat. There’s also a gonzo laser beam death massacre, which doesn’t disappoint.
“An Eye For An Eye” broaches similar ideas, but touches on the corrupted nature of the judicial system and police force, and how they can so easily be gamed. It’s encouraging to see this episode attempt to include some LGBTQ+ storytelling all the way back in 1997, but it’s also largely played for titillation. There’s shallow depth given to these characters’ relationships. At times this feels like a deranged Batman: The Animated Series episode that doesn’t feature the Dark Knight. It includes one of the series’ strongest conclusions where its twisted femme fatale has her skin stolen and donated to others in some Brazil-level cosmetic carnage.
Most of Spicy City’s episodes are cautionary tales where an over-reliance on technology leads to mankind’s increased laziness where machines surpass them as the dominant breed. “Sex Drive” explores this concept through romance and whether it’s possible for a man to truly love a machine or if it’s an inherently artificial construct. It’s some really deep material, even if it’s not perfectly executed. Like most of Spicy City’s episodes, the central idea is way ahead of the curve, which in this case is the unconventional romance, Her. “Sex Drive” repeatedly compares, contrasts, and overlaps human and machine until they’re left as one “humanchine” portmanteau. Spicy City’s final episode, “Raven’s Revenge,” attempts to flesh out the series’ sultry host so that she’s more than just a bookend to episodes. In doing so, this finale digs into body modifications and genetic mutations that reflect “alterna-ceuticals,” which attempt to “cure” and “imperfect society.”
Spicy City faced an uphill battle and didn’t leave much of a cultural impact during its short run, but HBO did actually try to foster the series and help it grow into something with legs. HBO’s main condition regarding season two’s development is that Bakshi would need to replace season one’s writing team (which included his son, Preston) with professional screenwriters. Bakshi wouldn’t budge on this area of compromise, which led to Spicy City’s season two renewal being rescinded and the program being reduced to the footnote that it is today. HBO would continue to pursue genre anthology series, but animation was no longer near the top of their agenda.
Spicy City’s six episodes are broad in their execution, but several installments conclude with some genuinely disturbing acts of horror that reiterate the dangers of experimental technology. Some entries allow for a peaceful coda. However, by and large there’s a nihilism that courses through the series that’s reminiscent of HBO’s other big genre anthology series, Tales from the Crypt. Overall, nothing in Spicy City amounts to must-see genre storytelling, but it still makes for an entertaining distraction for a few hours. Spicy City isn’t necessarily worse than some of the other sci-fi and horror anthology series that exist. More than anything it succeeds as a fascinating time capsule of the late 1990s and a promising premise that could have possibly evolved into something more substantial and memorable if Bakshi and the show’s production got out of their own way.
So many sci-fi anthology series proudly adapt stories from the genre’s greats and Spicy City might have made more of an impact if it decided to riff on the works of Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, or even Clive Barker for even just one of its episodes. A longer season could have also featured a healthy mix of original stories and classic adaptations. However, it’s likely for the best that Spicy City attempted to forge its own path even if it’s one that not many people were interested in. Science fiction needs to learn from its mistakes in order for it to evolve and Spicy City has no shortage of lessons to learn. The obscure series has new value during a time when anthology series and cyberpunk stories are at an all-time high. 
Daniel Kurland is a freelance writer, comedian, and critic, whose work can be read on Splitsider, Bloody Disgusting, Den of Geek, ScreenRant, and across the Internet. Daniel knows that “Psycho II” is better than the original and that the last season of “The X-Files” doesn’t deserve the bile that it conjures. If you want a drink thrown in your face, talk to him about “Silent Night, Deadly Night Part II,” but he’ll always happily talk about the “Puppet Master” franchise. The owls are not what they seem.
“30 Coins” Season Two – HBO Original Series Trailer Invites You to Hell This October
‘9’ – Revisiting the Stitchpunk Horrors of 2009’s Animated Movie
Don’t Expect “The Last of Us” Season 2 Until 2025… At the Earliest
Published
on
By
One of the oldest horror tropes in the book, the old, dusty, unfinished basement/crawl space setting has provided a cornucopia of stories about the universal fear of what lurks in the darkest and least-coziest corners of our homes. Yet, in Wes Craven’s 1991 lesser mainstream, still beloved cult favorite The People Under the Stairs, the what’s-hiding-in-the-basement angle is reversed and subverted, as the real monsters are not the othered hiding in the basement, and the home invaders are the heroes. Three decades later, the blueprint for People has imprinted itself onto a couple of other soon-to-be cult favorites, last year’s Barbarian and this summer’s Cobweb— all of which share much more in common than merely their set-ups.
Shifting tonally between biting commentary on social economics and campiness, The People Under the Stairs waivers between Candyman and a Tales From the Crypt episode, as its middle finger to hypocritical, rich Regan-era families is healthily balanced with the outrageousness of leather gimp suits and laughably uncomfortable “Mommy” and “Daddy” kink nicknames. On the border between the projects and a wealthier Los Angeles neighborhood, juvenile Fool (Brandon Adams) is encouraged to join a robbery of an old, rickety mansion nearby which is believed to be hiding gold coins within, and as Fool’s mother is growing sicker, and his family gets closer to eviction. When one of the other robbers poses as a municipal worker and gets permission to enter the Robeson house, he turns up dead, and Fool and his elder associate get locked inside the house of horrors that extends well beyond just the basement.
When Fool encounters the pale, long-finger-nailed, unkempt people living under the mansion stairs, he’s frightened by their means of cannibalism to survive, but he’s instantly made aware that the actual monsters are the Robesons (Wendy Robie and Everett McGill). On the outside, the allegedly married couple is every bit the cliché: polite, properly dressed, cookie-serving all-Americans who believe in all-American family values. Interiorly, they’re kidnapping and abusing children who don’t abide their “see/speak/hear no evil” rules, as well as racists that exploit and profit from their minority tenants. Furious that a Black kid has escaped their grasp within the house and befriends their pristine “daughter” Alice (A.J. Langer), as well as the wall-crawling rebel Roach (Sean Whalen), the Robesons hunt Fool down, eventually to their detriment.
Zach Cregger’s Barbarian contains three distinct acts: a woman arrives at her Airbnb in the middle of the night to find it already occupied; the actor guy who owns said Airbnb loses his next gig and returns to the property with intentions of selling it; the house’s original owner apparently still lives in its basement, with a female creature who’s the product of his abductions and sexual assaults. Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb is more simplistic, telling the story of a young boy who suspects his emotionally stunted parents are keeping a girl who went missing in the confines of their walls. The girl is revealed to be his deformed, spider-like sister Sarah that his parents were ashamed of, who, once unleashed, is a vengeful threat to everything that gets in her way.
‘Barbarian’
Neglectful parenting and broken family structures are omnipresent throughout Craven’s filmography, however, in People, child abuse is taken to another level— made only worse by the fact that “Mommy” and “Daddy” are revealed to not even be Alice’s real parents, but an incestuous brother-sister duo that stole her as a baby. Alice is not only physically tortured with scolding, hot water baths as punishment and other physical attacks, as the film hints at off-screen sexual abuse occurring, as well. Incestuous sexual abuse is also the root cause of the underground monstrosity in Barbarian, as the red herring “monster” is the deformed-looking female creature referred to as The Mother, yet, the actual monster is really Frank (Richard Brake), aka The Mother’s father, whom abducts, rapes, and has kept women and their offspring captive in the basement (not dissimilar to another basement incest horror, Don’t Breathe, as well.) The abuse is less heightened in Cobweb, as Peter’s parents are cold, emotionally distant gaslighters that use intimidation tactics and deprive him of childhood joys like trick-or-treating and socializing. After Peter gets in trouble at school, his parents lock him in the basement as punishment, described by screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin as the “hermetically sealed environment his parents have created for him.”
Hinted at but less apparent in Cobweb, both People and Barbarian pointedly mention “changing neighborhoods,” in which the houses/basements in question are located within areas outside of major cities that have experienced the phenomenon known as “white flight,” a.k.a. white families moving out in favor of minority families moving in. In the 1991 film, the Robesons note how their L.A. mansion and neighborhood have been getting hit by robbery attempts more often, while the little Airbnb house in Barbarian is located within the real Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor, which historically became increasingly more crime-ridden and abandoned over time. In a 1980s flashback scene in the latter, a neighbor warns they’re putting the house up for sale because the “neighborhood is going to hell.” The proprietor villains who are harboring hellish secrets within these houses use their properties as a means of hiding in plain sight— no one will suspect the Robesons’ big, fancy mansion has a house full of missing children, and no one is paying any mind to that one, decent-looking Airbnb house in an otherwise rundown neighborhood. Both films even exploit the dressing-up-as-an-ordinary-blue-collar/utility-worker ploy as an excuse to invade a home, to different outcomes. Unlike the other two, the old, seedy family home in Cobweb seems to exist for more aesthetic purposes than pointed commentary, however, like the others, this average-looking house is also used for hiding their secret in plain sight, even if some neighborhood kids’ curiosities lead them to believe it’s the weird house on the block they want to raid. Neighborhood classism is used to each film’s advantage.
‘Cobweb’
Without using violence to convey it, each film depicts the common horror trope of lacking competent police officers, or, at least, purposefully underused ones. Each film is subtle enough that, on the surface, the trope seems like a mere convenient plot device to keep the protagonists in danger, however, specific scenes suggest more pointed digs. In People, Mommy and Daddy put on their best personas to the cops arriving at their house, providing cookies, sweets, and smiles to deter this very easily distracted, very incompetent police force. The massive size of the Robeson house aside, they fail at giving it a good enough search, because they’re so easily manipulated by the respectable veneer of the Robesons. (The idea for the film was based on a real story about a couple of Black robbers that burgled an L.A. home, which inadvertently led to police discovering the bigger issue of children being locked away. It’s also worth noting the film came out eight months after the Rodney King riots in 1991 Los Angeles.) In Barbarian, Tess (Georgina Campbell) gets ahold of a pair of Detroit cops after being held prisoner, only to be dismissed as a likely “crackhead” or a “crazy person.” They don’t believe Tess, therefore they do nothing to assist her, rendering themselves as useless. In Cobweb, nobody calls on Peter’s parents, which is either a convenience or perhaps an implied distrust of cops, particularly from teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), who goes straight to help Peter herself versus calling any outside professional resources.
A glaring trait Miss Devine, Tess, and Fool share in the trio of films is being characters of Color that serve as the films’ heroes. Miss Devine seems to care more for Peter than his parents do, and after saving him and helping him lock his spider-sister/entity in the basement, she adopts him. After the cops bail on her, Tess rescues Justin Long’s AJ, survives his attempt at killing her to save himself, and shoots The Mother dead to escape. And Tess isn’t the only one, as the Black homeless man whom she initially feared was only warning her to not step foot in that Airbnb. Fool blows up the Robeson mansion, single-handedly saves (almost) all the victims under the stairs, and steals the gold coins to give to the fellow impoverished folks in the neighborhood. Undoubtedly a deliberate choice for all three films that have so much to say about who we’re socialized to trust versus who we should actually trust, Miss Devine, Tess, and Fool are exceptions within a genre that has been “historical for excluding the African-American element,” as fellow Wes Craven character Maureen Evans would say.
‘The People Under the Stairs’
As the best horror does, the commentary within People, Barbarian, and Cobweb is carefully laid underneath digestible genre fun and wacky reveals, almost like a parent getting their kids to eat broccoli by adding cheese. The outlandish appearances of The Mother, Sarah the spider-like sister, and the kids under the Robesons’ stairs are almost too outrageous to be downright scary. For every moment of gore in People, another moment is slapstick, as even the Robesons themselves fall victim to their own ridiculous booby traps. Something about a man of supposed traditional values hunting down a kid through the walls wearing his gimp suit is slyly comical. The two more recent films set the audience up for something tonally darker, only to lean in on their shared, welcomed campiness, as Barbarian forces them to witness a larger-than-life creature bottle-feed adults and make them her “baby,” and Cobweb has a somber quietness to it before Sarah and her eight (legs?) start racking up a body count in its wild third act.
With their equally entertaining and nuanced perspectives on just how sinister a normal-looking house can be, The People Under the Stairs, Barbarian, and Cobweb will never allow basement horror to feel anything but unconventional again.
‘Barbarian’
Copyright © 2021 Bloody Disgusting, LLC
You must be logged in to post a comment.