Main cast: Dennis Christopher (Laurence Bauer), Tracey Walter (Ed the Janitor), William Lanteau (Tom Hart), and Pam Grier (Matilde)
Director: Randall Moldave

Cutthroat banker Laurence Bauer makes a killing by taking over established companies and milking the hell out of them before moving on to his next target. He is successful because of a bargain he made with the help of voodoo priestess Matilde: power and wealth in exchange for sacrifices.

In his latest trip to Matilde’s shop of horrors, things get freaky when she starts babbling about how he needs to pay the price and let himself be slowly taken over by Obeah, re-imagined here as some kind of Satan, and in his panic he ends up killing Matilde. Hah, like that will protect him!

That’s basically Hostile Takeover in a nutshell: capitalist asshole bites the big one.

However, while the previous episode is a pretty nice kind of absurd, this one features a bad kind. The story makes little sense and I’m not sure if it’s kosher to combine Christianity and voodoo into one bizarre mix and represented by a guy wearing what looks like a reject monster costume from those live action Japanese superhero shows from the 1980s.

Also, the episode spends way too much time on Pam Grier playing a cartoon version of a voodoo priestess, shrieking and acting up to fill up screen time without actually adding anything substantial to the plot. Then again, maybe the whole point is to laugh at how cartoon-like voodoo is being presented on this episode.

Dennis Christopher also overreacts a lot, like he’s in some acid dream of a Scooby-Doo episode, and I can’t say he’s entirely wrong about that.

Incoherent, pointless, and muddled up with people doing their best impressions of vaguely racist and insulting caricatures, this episode is indeed hostile to one’s brain cells. The people behind this show should take classes from Tales from the Crypt on how to do this kind of racist caricatures in an entertaining manner!