Episode 59: 2025 Halloween Series #1 – Tales From the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood and Bottom 5 ‘…Of Blood’s

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood (1996)

Directed by: Gilbert Adler (In his only feature directing credit)

• Adler is mostly known as a producer on a variety of genre anothlogy TV shows, including my much-beloved The Hitchhiker as well as Freddy’s Nightmares and, of course, Tales from the Crypt.
• He directed episodes here and there of some of the shows he produced and apparently did a number of Crypt-Keeper segments for Takes from the Crypt.
• He’s part of the original trio of “Dark Castle Entertainment” producers, which also include writer/director/producer Robert Zemeckis and uber-producer Joel Silver.
  • Filmjitsu listeners might remember Dark Castle Entertainment as the late 90’s production house responsible for “13 Ghosts” (RIP, Tony Shaloub) and “Ghost Ship” (best opening ten minutes of a P.O.S. movie ever.)

Some notes about Tales from the Crypt, the HBO anthology series.

• It ran for 93 episodes from 1989-1996, which is when Bordello of Blood came out.
  • The first Tales from the Crypt theatrical release was Demon Knight starring Billy Zane, Jada Pinkett and William Sadler (Col. Sanders from Die Hard II, Death from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and the mummy from the Bordello of Blood wraparound segments.
    • Demon Knight was directed by Ernest Dickerson, but interestingly was originally going to be a non-Tales From the Crypt flick directed by Tom Holland but he did Fatal Beauty instead. UGH. It then was going to be directed by Mary Lambert, but she did Pet Semetary 2 instead (double ugh.)
    • It was Dickerson’s third feature film after and at this point he was still mostly known as a cinematographer who shot several Spike Lee movies including Do The Right Thing.
  • There was a “third” movie that fulfilled the Universal Pictures order of three “Tales from the Crypt” movies. It was called “Ritual” and like the other two movies, started out having no affiliation with “Tales…” until somehow Dimension Films decided to convert it into one by adding the Cryptkeeper in dreadlocks as an opening segment.
    • Thank you, Mike, for not making me watch this, as it sounds painful – it’s part of a series of 12 remakes of old RKO horror flicks commission by Miramax.
• The Tales from the Crypt movie histories are SO CONVOLUTED.
• The show was widely considered good, dumb, horror fun that was based on the old EC Comics of the same name.
  • EC also produced several other horror and crime comics from which the shows were directly adapted
• Those comic books, along with the Warren-published titles like “Creepy” and “Eerie” also inspired Stephen King and George Romero’s “Creepshow” as well as its 1987 sequel “Creepshow 2” and the Shutter-produced series that lasted four seasons.
  • I think it’s interesting to note that the success of Creepshow and it’s sequel along with anthology TV/Cable shows like the 80’s reboot of The Twilight Zone, Laurel Entertainment’s “Tales from the Darkside,” as well as HBO’s “Ray Bradbury Presents” and “The Hitcher” likely led to the idea of directly adapting the comic book that inspired Creepshow.
    • So, the original EC and Warren Comics inspired Creepshow. It succeeds, so it inspires the “Tales from the Crypt Series” (as well as Freddy’s Nightmares, no doubt) and then that leads to, later, the resurrection of Creepshow as a series, which I think may well lead to another Tales from the Crypt
• I personally never loved the Cryptkeeper – the skeletal, wise-cracking host that intros and closes each segment. The humor was dumb and regardless of however cool the puppet and voice-work (by actor Jon Kassir) were, it wasn’t particularly funny, just dumb in a nearly cringe-inducing way. That said, I liked the episodes themselves as I was a huge fan of anthology TV in the 80’s and 90’s.  SOme of my favorites included:
  • The 80’s Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchock Presents reboot.
  • The Hitcher and Ray Bradbury Presents on HBO.
  • Tales from the Darkside
  • Freedy’s Nightmares – although this to a lesser extent because Freddy became just as annoyingly unfunny as The Cryptkeeper.
  • And yeah, I liked “Friday the 13th: The Series” and even that weird “Max Headroom” show which, like the X-Files, were sort of both “anthologies with mythologies.” Ah the 80’s and 90’s. What a time to be alive.
• The big thing about those HBO-produced anthology series? They had swearing, gore and – yep – nudity. So, younger Santo would like to thank everyone involved for that. (Especially “The Hitchhiker.”)

Some notes about Bordello of Blood:

• The list of production/writing talent on the Tales from the Crypt movies is 100% Bonkers.
  • First of all, you’ve got Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the director and writer duo of the entire “Back to the Future” series.
    • They apparently wrote this movie at the very beginning of their careers  as an exploitation pic that they could break into the industry with. When Universal saw the success of Demon Knight, they needed a quick follow-up pick and this was selected.
    • Zemeckis had quite the link to “Tales from the Crypt” as he directed several episodes including “All Through the Night” which is probably best known as “The Psycho Santa” episode where Larry Drake (Darkman) plays a homicidal St. Nick.
  • It was produced by Joel Silver, arguably one of the most successful producers of all time, who also was one of the main producers on the TV show.
    • Before he took on the producing reigns for the Tales from the Crypt movies, he did:
      • Die Hard (1 and 2)
      • Lethal Weapon (1,2 and 3)
      • Predator (1 and 2)
      • Demolition Man
    • After he, of course, did:
      • The Matrix movies
      • Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
      • V for Vendetta
      • The Guy Ritchie/Robert Downy Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies.
  • Also produced by David Giler and Walter Hill, you know, the two guys who co-wrote “Alien” (along with Dan O’Bannon)

What’s it about?

Erika Eleniak is a Bible-thumping producer working with an Evangelist played by Chris Saradon to bring his holy-rock-and-rollin’ show to the masses. But when her miscreant teenage brother, played by Corey Feldman disappears, Eleniak is rebuffed by the police who are overwhelmed with missing persons cases and she instead turns to Dennis Miller, a washed-up detective who trolls the police station with a single business card looking for work.

Turns out that Feldman and his buddy went to a whorehouse hidden in the local mortuary – you get into a coffin to enter the den of iniquity – and fell victim to Lillith, played by Angie Everheart, and her bevvy of bodacious bloodsuckers. Shenanigans ensue, including some exploding hookers that definitely reminded me of “Frankenhooker” and a plot is revealed that Sarandon’s evangelist character was working with a pint-sized Indiana Jones (played by well-known dwarf actor Phil Fondacaro) who possessed a key to control Lillith. Sarandon and his little buddy were working to punish sinners by empowering Lillith to feed on them, but it all got out of hand and when Eleniak is captured by Lillith, we get a final stand-off between unlikely allies Miller and Sarandon and Lilith’s army of vampire whores! 

Is it dumb? Yes! Is it fun? Not really!

So, how was it?

• I didn’t love it, and on the heels of our recent viewing of “Frankenhooker,” this felt like a less-inspired and surprisingly adolescent goof whereas that film is genuinely witty and funny.
  • Bordello of Blood is a horror comedy, but it’s not funny or scary. In fact, like the Cryptkeeper, I found it pretty annoying largely due to Dennis Miller’s take on the wry personality Bill Murry cultivated so well in the 80’s and 90’s.
    • Miller really is the weak link, and word is that neither he  – nor lead vampire Angie Everheart – were director Gilbert Adler’s preferred leads.
    • The problem with Miller is HE thinks he’s funny, that his references are witty. But his attitude makes the entire thing feel like there are no stakes (stakes! get it!?) and so you really don’t care at all.
    • Erika Eleniak is here too, and while she was every hetero male teenager’s dream girl from 1990-1995, many a young man in 1996 was likely disappointed that a movie full of boobs didn’t feature hers.
      • This definitely was an issue in 1996 and in no way was a problem when I watched this movie for the first time in 2025. No. Not at all. Not even a little disappointed. No, really.
    • Corey Feldman, before his wacko-jacko transformation into a third-rate music act surrounded by blonde girls in angel costumes (if you’ve not seen this, you need to see it to believe it.)
      • He played 1/2 of the Frog Brothers in “The Lost Boys” – along with the other Corey, Corey Haim – and in that movie they ingeniously go after vamps with squirt guns filled with Holy Water.
      • In this one, Feldman is KILLED by a squirt gun filled with Holy Water, and I cannot believe that nearly ten years AFTER “The Lost Boys,” this was featured in this movie – WITH THIS ACTOR BEING KILLED AND IT’S DONE WITHOUT ANY IRONY.
    • Phil Fondacaro as the adventuring dwarf whose height plays absolutely zero role in his character is quite a surprise here.
      • I always remember Phil as Malcom Mallory in Charlie Band’s original “Troll” film as he was just a normal dude who happened to be short. I loved that he wasn’t the butt of any easy jokes in that movie – where he also played “Torok the Troll” – and as I recall it, he wasn’t the butt of any here either!
      • His character is sort of forgotten about for a long time. He shows up in the cold open in an expedition that seems like it could have been set in the 1800’s and includes a scene in which the characters are so surrounded by gnats that it was actually distracting to watch.
        • After he discovers Lillith’s tomb and takes control of her after merging the four severed chambers of he heart – he uses the key artifact from “Demon Knight” to pull this off – Phil vanishes until an hour later when he reappears as being in cahoots with Sarandon’s evangelist.
        • He then gets greedy at Lillith’s urging and does the stupidest thing any character does in this movie – destroys the key, thus freeing her to murder at will. Allegedly because he would get more money than Sarandon would give him. Uh huh. Sure.
  • What’s good? Very little.
    • Chris Sarandon as Reverend J.C. Current. Despite a horrifically awful name (the current J.C. – uh huh. ok.) Sarandon is positively eating up the chance to over-enunciate his pulpit proclamations and oh god, was I ever thankful every time he got on screen.
      • The character makes little to no sense – a holy man in cahoots with a she-devil to rid the world (or at least the neighborhood) of ne’er do wells just seems so completely idiotic.
      • But Sarandon completely understands the movie he’s in and his performance combines a kind of heightened-over-the-top comedic timing with that sly charisma that made him so memorable in the original Fright Night.
    • Practical effects are fun and – as I said previously – the exploding hookers, in this case vampires sprayed with Holy Water or exposed to sunlight – made me think of “Frankenhooker.”
    • Seeing William Sadler do a cameo at the beginning as a mummy gambling body parts with The Cryptkeeper was cool. That guy can up the quality of anything, in my opinion, and like when he played “Death” in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (a role he reprised in the third Bill and Ted made in 2020) he brings a super amount of goofy conviviality to the proceedings. He’s basically there to have fun and I’d love to see Sadler and Ron Perlman in a flick someday, although it might be too late as they’re both getting up there in age.
    • What didn’t make any sense!
      • What the fuck was up with the random closeup of what looks like a tongue piercing when introducing Corey Feldman’s character? I don’t think he’s every seen with a tongue ring and in the very next shot he doesn’t appear to be dealing with any kind of pain or whatever. Just this very random shot that I really didn’t understand.
      • Why have Erika Eleniak’s character fight against Lillith WHEN SHE’S ALREADY BEEN TURNED INTO A VAMPIRE?
      • Why the three-nipple vampire?
      • Why would Erika Eleniak turn to Dennis Miller, this irritating scuzz, to find her brother? He’s so clearly a dirtbag, and yet time and again she keeps coming back to get his help.
        • What makes even less sense is why Miller’s character is working so hard for Eleniak to find her brother. Here’s a guy who sacrifices nothing for no one and he’s here risking life and limb for her? Why??! Because she’s cute?!
      • The goddamn laser beam that Sarandon was using as a prop for his rock-n-roll sermon. The fact that it misfires earlier in the movie during a rehearsal guaranteed it was bound to come back, and while it’s clever that it makes a cross and cuts Lilith’s heart into four pieces, it should have been featured different and always programmed to draw a cross. Or something. As it was, it’s just so incredibly convenient and stupid.
    • What was bad?
      • Again, Miller. So awful. He’s a good looking guy too. He should have been able to make this work. But his slimy superiority complex just made me hate him. And the fact he was supposed to be sort of a loser just made me wonder why we’d even root for this tool.
      • No nude Eleniak. I mean, in 1996 this would have been cause for disappointment. Not now. Of course not.
      • The super-soakers gag ripped off from “The Lost Boys.”
      • The exploding hookers ripped off from “Frankenhooker.”
      • The massive leaps in character logic to move things along.
        • Eleniak hiring Miller
        • Miller giving any shits whatsoever
        • Sarandon working with Lilith
        • Fondacaro destroying the key
        • Anyone getting into a casket willingly that’s passing into a furnace
        • Any cop character in the film
      • It goes on and on.

The whole movie felt like successful Hollywood white guys getting in touch with their inner-adolescent fantasies and sense of humor. But nothing was titillating nor was it humorous. It just felt like big name talent rolling around in the mud as if to prove they were still edgy, and it all comes up short.

Bottom Five ‘…Of Blood’s

As you’ve said, Mike, we’ve had some real thinkers and some real stinkers for our Bottom Fives, and while I’m hopeful this will be one of our more fun bottom five concepts, I’m also very aware of how quickly this could go downhill. The mission – as I saw it – was deceptively simple: choose a non-horror movie, append the phrase “of Blood” to the title and craft a bottom five horror movie concept. So with that in mind, how did you interpret this and what is your number five?

5.) On Golden Pond of Blood

The 1981 Oscar-winning drama from Mark Rydell gets the Wes Craven treatment in this lakefront nightmare. Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn return as Norman and Ethel Thayer — only this time, daughter Jane (still Jane Fonda) leaves behind, not a sweet young boy for the summer, but a sociopathic problem child who starts turning their quiet lakeside retreat into a siege of psychological torture. I’m reimaging his dramatic classic and a home-invasion thriller, so hone are the tender lessons about aging and forgiveness; in their place, are booby traps, drownings, and Hepburn clutching a shotgun in her nightgown while whispering to Fonda, “I’m YOUR knight in shining armor.” The wholesome boat crash and water rescue in the original? Now it’s the kid holding Norman underwater, only to let him live just long enough to do it again. By the end, Jane and the boy’s father return to find her parents transformed into blood-soaked survivalists, their cabin rigged like the third act of a gore-soaked Home Alone. And the kid’s father ends up impaled when he trips over a fishing line, his body falling atop his son’s.  The finale still ends with the geese flying off over the water… they’re just carrying scraps of the boy and the dad with them.

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4.) Legally Blonde of Blood

What if Elle Woods didn’t just prove them wrong — she proved them dead wrong? In this blood-soaked satire, Reese Witherspoon returns as Elle, but instead of enduring condescension from Harvard’s old-money elite, she snaps — in heels. Her sleazy law professor (Victor Garber) gets crushed under a copy machine filled with legal briefs. Her ex-boyfriend Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis) and his fiancée Vivian (Selma Blair) are harpooned together mid–romantic cruise while celebrating their re-rengagement. When her sorority sister Brooke Taylor-Windham (Ali Larter) stands trial for murder, Elle decides to take over the case — by eliminating the entire courtroom. ( Cue a “Perfect Day” needle-drop over her slow-mo murder spree!) Chutney (Linda Cardellini) confesses after a Saw-like torture sequence and Elle walks away scot-free with a surprise ending that finds Luke WIlson decapitated right as he was about to propose to Elle, his last synapses firing off as he exclaims “I did NOT see that coming” a la Anchorman. It’s Mean Girls by way of American Psycho! It’s Legally Blond OF BLOOD!

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3.) Field of Dreams of Blood

If you build it… they will die. In this splatter reinterpretation of Phil Alden Robinson’s heartland fantasy, Kevin Costner still hears voices in his Iowa cornfield, only this time they’re whispering from beneath the soil, not beyond the grave. Instead of resurrected ballplayers, what claw their way out are the rotting corpses of those same athletes — bitter that they’ve been consigned to baseball purgatory. James Earl Jones, naturally, still gives an inspirational speech, but midway through it he’s eviscerated by a barbed-wire baseball bat swung by “Shoeless” Joe (Ray Liotta, getting cinematic vengeance on whoever was responsible for his being cast in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale). The film ends with Costner’s Ray Kinsella realizing too late that he’s opened a portal to hell, and as the undead ghosts march toward his farmhouse, he whispers, “Dad… want to have a catch?” before being tackled and devoured. Directed by Sam Raimi, of course.

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2. Chariots of Fire of Blood

The inspirational 1981 drama about faith, friendship, and track-and-field gets re-imagined as a dystopian death race in Chariots of Fire of Blood. Instead of Olympic glory, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams find themselves drafted into The Running Man-style “Church of Speed”, a government-sponsored competition where runners must literally outrun weaponized chariots armed with spinning blades and flamethrowers. Each lap ends with a fresh “miracle” of carnage, and the iconic slow-motion beach run becomes a stretch of coastline littered with landmines and burning corpses. Vangelis’s theme still plays — only now it’s remixed with chainsaws and tortured screams. As the body count climbs, Liddell prays for salvation mid-sprint while Abrahams rigs his competitor’s sneakers with explosives, all leading to a final act where the two men must run not for God or country, but to cross a finish line at the threshold of Hell.

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1.) Driving Miss Daisy of Blood

Set in 1960s Georgia, this revisionist gorefest follows Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman) as he dutifully chauffeurs Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) — until a group of backwoods cultists carjack them and attempt yo use Daisy’s Cadillac for a blood-soaked crime-spree. Only they don’t know that this car has a deadly, even more violent secret! When Hoke reveals the car feeds on racist souls, it’s already after the carjackers have been run-down and had hands and heads removed by slamming doors and self-rolling windows. Hoke, now one with the car, takes detours through the Jim Crow South, luring bigots into Daisy’s trunk of terror! Tandy, once horrified, soon joins him in purging the hateful one by one, their relationship evolving from awkward employer-employee to gleeful partners in righteous grue. Ends with Daisy whispering “You’re my best friend, Hoke,” as the pair run down a Klan meeting. So much blood-spattered white. Directed, as you well might have guessed by the number of times Tandy casually says the n-word, by Quentin Tarantino.