Review of Tales from the Hood (1995) by Kevin D — 26 Jul 2011

Is "Tales from the Hood" shooting for true profundity, or is it intentionallly a big goofy spectacle? It's hard to say: that so-bad-it's-good magic is hard to capture in a bottle, arising more often from painfully earnest intentions than from any above-it-all pranksterism (like those parodies of 50's scifi? dreadful). But there are just SO many bits here that couldn't have been imagined as being scary by, y'know, anyone, ever, and there are sundry bewilderments of a more fundamental sort as well. Take the segment that features one Crazy K, which begins as a barefaced ripoff, Clockwork Orange in the hood, then undermines what little point it might have been making by faking us out and going the route of "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge". There is no point and no moral to the story, just a big wtf.

Accordingly it is the most earnest segment of the anthology that is the weakest, lacking as it is in this anarchic spirit. I'm thinking of the segment about the little boy and the monster, which is an unsubtle parable about child abuse. Even here, there's a bit of that wild magic, when the abusive stepdad, played by a cold-as-ice David Alan Grier (believe it), is reduced to rubber by the boy's lame superpowers.

The other two segments are spectacular. Some white cops kill a black lawyer, who comes back as a magic zombie and kills them in ways that... Boy, there is not an adjective I know that will complete that sentence. Here's the play-by-play. Daune Whitaker pisses on his grave, so the zombie lawyer grabs him by the balls and pulls him screaming into the ground (a tribute to Peter Jackson's "Braindead", aight? everybody take a shot!). Michael Massee and Wings Hauser look on in horror as Whitaker meets his grisly end, and Hauser unloads his gun at the zombie lawyer's headstone for some reason before they beat a hasty retreat in their cop car. Somehow, though moving at a zombie shuffle, zombie lawyer catches up with the car and he pulls off Wings Hauser's head. Then he levitates some heroin needles and pins Michael Massee to a mural in a Jesus Christ pose. There is then a POV shot of a needle flying into Massee's mouth (clarification: not from the point of view of the neeedle, but from the point of view of Massee's uvula). Then Massee melts into paint and becomes part of the mural. Of course! It all makes so much sense! But hey, anybody: why is there a bottle of glowing green liquid inside the zombie lawyer when he gets ripped open? This was a little detail I didn't understand.

As for the other segment, let me merely say this: I would watch a feature length movie starring Corbin Bernsen as a racist gubernatorial candidate menaced by little black claymation dolls. If all I can get is 20-minutes of that, then I can ask for no more. Hypothetical readers, as I type these words, tears of gratitude spill down my face. I am not kidding you.

I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to the great Clarence Williams III, who plays the hissing undertaker who relates these tales from the hood to three bored gangsters.