Tales From the Hood

A question posed itself throughout my viewing of 1995's TALES FROM THE HOOD - Do the social ills of the African American go down easier for viewers if they are presented within genre horror? Those who avoid the social dramas of Spike Lee and many others may in fact get cinematically enlightened with something that flashes the low grade goods: blood, guts, action, sex.  They come for the exploitation, and may actually end up getting the salient points director Rusty Cundieff and his co-writer partner/producer Darin Scott are making.  Honestly, you'd have to be pretty dense not to......

TALES FROM THE HOOD is an anthology of four grim stories told by a rather odd mortician named Mr. Simms (Clarence Williams III, having a ball).  Three drug dealers show up one night to Simms' funeral home to purchase some drugs the old man found in a alley.  Before he gives them "the shit", he spins his yarns, each inspired by a casket's occupant.  Frightful recollections of a rookie police officer who witnesses his fellow men in public brutalize a black city councilman, a young boy whose bruises are blamed on a monster, a racist senator who gets an unusual history lesson in slavery, and a gang banger who goes to prison and submits to behavior modification.  After each story, the trio gets more and more impatient.  Until...Nope.  No spoilers from me.

Some of what happens in these tales are old hat, certainly familiar to fans of the genre.  A murdered man returns from the grave to avenge his killers.  Puppets come to life.  But there are novel twists to these stories, and Cundieff's direction is often creative and energetic.   How that "monster" is dispatched is unusual.  The final episode, the one with the unrepentant criminal who is given a chance for rehabilitation, is quite an eye opener and the most obvious polemic here....and highly effective.  You won't forget the imagery.

I enjoy anthology movies.  There is something irresistible about tight tales following one another, perhaps unrelated except in theme.  One ends and another begins, but you're still thinking on the last one.  The emotional impact of these stories surprised me.  Despite some (wonderfully) cheesy special effects, TALES FROM THE HOOD has aged all too well.  You may gasp at how timely it remains.  Those who don't ordinarily dig terror tales may take the journey for that.  But that final scene will put them right back in the bowels of B-movie horror.