A hip-hop Tales from the Crypt, executive produced by Spike Lee, Tales from the Hood commendably combines the lurid revenge fantasies of the former with the provocative Rodney King-era racial politics of the latter. The result is a grimly entertaining, stroke-for-stroke homage to the EC style re-imagined as a black thing, not a white thing.
Capably directed by Rusty Cundieff, Tales is structured anthology-style and narrated by its own “ghoulunatic” – a wild-eyed, crazy-froed mortician (Clarence Williams III, in a standout role) who tells his tales of Manichean justice-from-beyond-the-grave to a trio of street toughs ducking the rain (and a murder rap) in his mortuary. In typical EC fashion, by film’s end these three discover that they are the stars of its final vignette. The stories are just fair to good, but the black urban context and the film’s dynamic style – Cundieff cannily sets brash colors, horrific acts of violence, and dope-sick surrealism against a harrowing soundtrack of old school rap – give his effort a sense of urgency and dramatic style missing from your average EC pastiche, and pulls no political punches in the process.
Witness the film’s penultimate scenario, wherein a heartless gang-banger is forced by a group of scientists intent on “curing” him of his violent urges, Clockwork Orange-style, to watch a nightmarish montage of (real) white-on-black lynching images, only to be confronted by the ghosts of his own (mostly black) innocent bystanders when this radical therapy fails. It’s a hair-raising sequence made more haunting by its use of “real” horrific imagery (lynching photos), a provocative strategy that denies the viewer the distancing effect between fantasy and reality, text and subtext, customary in most horror films.
B+
(Copyright 2011 by S. L. Jones; all rights reserved)
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