Tales from the Hood

Tales From the Hood, another horror anthology film dripping with EC comics-style ghoulishness, strings together four stories told by a wild-haired, macabre funeral director (Clarence Williams III) to a trio of gangbangers seeking their missing drug stash in a mortuary. Virtually all of the tales are familiar -- walking corpses and voodoo dolls are staples of the format -- but director Rusty Cundieff makes every effort to inject the proceedings with social morality. Child abuse, racism, and police brutality each get a pretty heavy-handed treatment, but the last story, involving a voluntary "behavior modification" technique for an unrepentant killer (ala A Clockwork Orange) explodes off the screen. In the film's most powerful sequence, Cundieff serves up a quickly cut montage of unsettling images culled from a number of state historical archives depicting vicious, stomach-churning lynchings meant to deter the rapacious young killer from wanting to harm any more people. It's potent stuff, and makes one wish the rest of the film had this kind of intensity.

A tribute to movies like "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" and "Tales from the Crypt", "Tales from the Hood" presents some horror vignettes centering on life in the black ghetto. Some drug dealers go to a funeral home to pick up their stuff, only to have the eccentric owner (Clarence Williams III) tell them about the fates of some recent customers...with a twist at the end. At once a fun horror flick and also warning about getting mixed up with the wrong people, this is a cool one. A particular scene in the fourth vignette appears to be a tribute to "A Clockwork Orange". All in all, a real credit for director Rusty Cundieff and executive producer Spike Lee.

Featuring Tom Wright (the hitchhiker in "Creepshow 2"), David Alan Grier, Corbin Bernsen and Rosalind Cash (in her final role).

Very bizarre - just the way I like things! Ridiculous amount of profanity, cool horror & the editing is spot on. Not bad for a crazy a$$ African American flick, I don't mind these type occasionally.

An eccentric funeral director shares four tales of horror from an African American perspective with three young thugs. The first involves a man who exacts his revenge from beyond the grave after being murdered by crooked cops. The next tells of a boy alleged torment at the hands of a monster may not be tall tales. A white supremacist politician haunted by forces of injustices past highlights the third story, while the fourth focuses on a gangbanger undergoing frightening behavior modification.

TALES FROM THE HOOD benefits enormously from solid writing and an entertaining pace. With a running time of under 100 minutes, director Rusty Cundieff does an admirable job of cramming everything he's got into each vignette. Few of us have the stomach for a horror movie with a message, but this is one that succeeds. It has things to say about racism in our society and says them in ways in which they've never been said before. Though definitely not for all tastes, TALES FROM THE HOOD is a surprisingly solid horror anthology.

* *Cast Note: Clarence Williams III, who plays the funeral director, is best known as Linc from THE MOD SQUAD television series.

"This ain't no funeral parlor. This ain't the terrordome. Welcome to HELL mothaf*#%@!" In not too many words I want to express my respect for one of the most underrated horror movies of the 90s. Like The Twilight Zone it is a segmented film (although all directed by Rusty Cundieff) that spans across a good variety of horror genres. The real horrorshow here, though, is the domestic/racial issues against the black community. Cleverly (and without being preachy or offensive to white people), Cundieff disguised his agenda with rich characters and a bone chilling conclusion.

The HIGHPOINT of this movie for me is the film's proverbial ringleader- a funeral parlor director. The man, brilliantly and hilariously underplayed by a bug-eyed Clarence Williams III, finds a stack of drugs he wants to sell to three young hoods. As you watch you begin to wonder what eerie agenda he really has in store. These scenes tie all the vignettes together.

Also, the final segment is a very profound statement on gang violence (although beware, this is the preachiest segment). I like to call it A Clockwork Black because it applies Anthony Burgress's idea of reversing violence onto the offender onto a gang leader called Krazy K. Those K's in his name aren't a mistake either! Cundieff underlines a necessary argument about between black-on-black violence by comparing K to a neo nazi.

Like any memorable work of horror, Tales remembers to keep its monsters metaphorical. Police brutality, domestic violence, racial profiling, and gang violence are the most hideous creatures found here. I complement Rusty Cundieff on a job well done there. Excessive campiness and at-times generic camera work keep this from being great, but nothing stops its relevance in the genre.

STAR RATING: *** out of 4.