Review of Tales from the Hood 2 (2018) by Leslie S — 26 Dec 2018

Tales from the Hood 2: 2 out of 10: Well it has been 23 years since the well-received original so let us enjoy a direct to video sequel. That can't possibly go wrong.

In this one, Mr. Sims (Keith David) is hired by a Trump loving CEO called Dumass Beach to program a killer robot to better recognize future criminals by telling the robot stories about the hood. Are any of the stories even remotely about or even take place in the Hood? Nah.

The four stories are as follows:

A young girl and her friends decide to steal a Golliwog from a museum. It does not go well.

A group of thieves accidentally kills their hostage before ascertaining the location of some stolen loot. So they kidnap a TV Psychic to find it. It does not go well.

Two men out on a double Tinder date look to take advantage of the woman. It does not go well.

The ghost of Emmit Till and others teach a black man about the dangers of Republicanism and interracial marriages. It does not go well.

The Good: Well Keith David was pretty good in the lead role. Story number two was not actively bad. Story number three while being actively bad was at least entertaining on a so bad its good level.

The Bad: Have you ever met someone (hopefully online) whose point of view is so removed from our current reality it makes your head spin. You know a woman should not be allowed to initiate divorce or birth control should be illegal or a black man should commit suicide if he is involved with race mixing. Yep that last one, ye olde no miscegenation, is the over the top lesson from the very serious fourth story. It as if the worst element of The Root got a movie budget.

In fairness, the first story is as heavy-handed and preachy as the forth. The white girl who steals the Golliwog gets raped by a giant black Golliwog and is forced to bear his babies (dolls?) until she dies. So almost a tie with the forth. The first one squeezes into second place based entirely on the fact that the idea that anyone outside of an elderly British woman or African American collector even knows what a Golliwog is, simply is laughable. I have a hard time believing a modern teenager collects 1895's equivalent of The Minions.

The Ugly: I hate to leave the third story off the hook it is such an obvious tale poorly told but honestly both it, the opening CGI credits borrowed from an indie game asset swap, and the WTF story tying all this together all pale in the face of the sheer tastelessness of using Emmit Till to push a racist agenda promoting segregation. Seriously what were you going for here. Cause I think you missed it,.

In Conclusion: This portmanteau has scares and jokes as cheap as its budget. For a movie with eight producers (including Spike Lee), this feels like a very low budget cash grab mixed with a screenplay written by an Afrocentric equivalent of Franz Liebkind. Not to mention it is called 'Tales From the Hood 2" and yet none of the tales, including the wraparound story, actually takes place in the titular hood.

Also Dumass Beach? Really? What are you eight? Giving the bad guy a funny name has only worked once. It was in Life of Brian.