"Barrio Tales" - - Gross, Dude, Gross.

It really should come as no surprise that a movie called "Barrio Tales" features a roach coach, but damned if I didn't see it coming.

For those of you that don't know, a "Roach Coach" is a mobile restaurant. They tend to serve cheap food that can be made in bulk, like Mexican or Chinese food, and sold around business parks. They are subject to the same health inspections that regular restaurants have to undergo, but come on, there's always something fishy about food that can drive away.

When I worked at a business park I ate at the roach coach constantly. For nearly five years I got all of my meals out of a van. So when "Barrio Tales" started off their second story: "Uncle Tio's Taco Truck" and it starts with an image of this:





















Blerch. Gross.

"Barrio Tales" is a horror anthology and to my knowledge it is the first English language/Hispanic themed horror anthology. Back during the days of HBO's amazing (yet now unfortunately dated) show "Tales From The Crypt," lucky horror/rap fans such as myself were graced with movies like "Tales From The Hood," "Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror," "Street Tales of Terror" and "Hood's Hoody Hoods Tales of Hood Horror" OK, I made that last one up, but my point is the urban horror anthology has been around awhile and it's nice to see a Latino variation of that.

But really, dude, really . . .you had to ruin the roach coach for me?

The wraparound for this trilogy is two rich white kids travel to Barrio (which I always thought just meant "city" but the characters here keep referring to it as a proper noun, so I'm not sure on that) to buy drugs from a dealer named Pedro. Instead, they get waylaid by a mysterious stranger (spoiler alert: it's really Pedro) who wants to tell them some stories because Americans are always in a hurry to get what they want.

The first story is about a Hispanic maid from Barrio who works at a mansion. A bunch of selfish rich kids treat her like shit, except for one guy who can speak Spanish and his dad works as a janitor, and they end up accidently bashing her skull in. The maid's wizard aunt casts a spell on the kids who killed her and they either lose their sight, their ability to speak, or their ability to hear . . .but at the end they all end up dead so I'm sure she could have just skipped to the "death" part of the spell.

"OH NO! I can't speak! . . .or walk, or swim or do anything
because I'm dead.

That type of story is pretty par for the course when it comes to anthologies, or horror in general. A victim is wronged and the guilty are dispatched via supernatural means.

The third story, though, is about a group of illegal immigrants being kidnapped by hillbillies and being tortured to death. Which really isn't supernatural and in fact probably does happen, unfortunately. For the last half hour of "Barrio Tales" I'm thinking less about the movie and more about how much it would suck to have to sneak into a country that would probably kill you if they knew they could get away with it.

This looks less like a horror film and more
like a Tea Party recruitment ad.

Now, to be fair the third story does feature "El Monstruo" who is described as an urban legend among human traffickers and since his name technically means "The Monster" and he does survive getting shot in the chest a hundred times you might be able to say that's supernatural. But I just figure he was a buff dude on a lot of crank.

So in the first story we have the Hispanic victim and in the third story we have a lot of Hispanic victims. But in the second story, the stomach-clenching "Uncle Tio's Taco Truck," Uncle Tio is the bad guy. You see, those delicious tacos you've been eating all those years, those were the flesh and muscle tissue of human beings. But what type of people, you're wondering, would make such delicious tacos?

Were they the remains of arrogant white kids who bullied the downtrodden?

Were they the innards of "The Man" who ran the system?

Maybe they were the ligaments and tendons of an racist blowhard?

Nope! Just kids!

It's a bit jarring to go from Hispanic victim to Hispanic killer and then back again. Obviously it is the filmmakers prerogative on how the flow of the film goes. But in movies like "Tales From The Hood," "Snoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror" etc. the horror is also balanced with an idea of justice: the perpetrators of black on black crime or the white oppressors are the victim. That might sound like a bleeding heart but by having Uncle Tio go after rich kids instead of neighborhood kids he would have been less of a monster (or el monstruo, you learn something new every day) and more of an avenging angel. After all, the first and third story of "Barrio Tales" does explore the social justice angle and it would have been a more complete film thematically if "Tio's" story did as well. All I got was the uneasy feeling of knowing I ate five years worth of mystery meat.

"Barrio Tales" is an odd duck. The directing is competent, the pacing works well and the acting is decent. The picture quality and sound all point towards an eye towards quality. There's a weird interaction of characters between the three stories which is something I haven't seen in anthology before nd was a cool idea. I can see "Barrio Tales" being the first of a franchise, but even if it is a one-off I think these filmmakers have some talent and I'd like to see more from them. I enjoyed it, but unless you're a fan of horror anthologies I'd wait to catch this movie on TV.

I would stop eating at roach coaches though.

Oh, the two rich kids looking for drugs in the wrap-around narrative . . .what happens to them, you ask?

They get their throats brutally slit and are chopped up and turned into tacos that are given to homeless Mexicans!

Welcome to Barrio!

Uncle Tio eventually moved out of Barrio and
changed his name to George Zimmerman.