Tales from the Hood is a horror anthology film produced by Spike Lee. It features a primarily black cast, and mixes real-life horrors such as domestic abuse with a supernatural element. This is a really interesting idea for a horror movie, and it mostly hits the mark. While most horror anthology films feel like rejected Twilight Zone episodes crammed into a movie, Tales from the Hood feels more like rejects from Tales from the Dark Side (A 1980's Twilight Zone knockoff). The horror elements work for the most part, but the twist endings and attempts at discussing important issues come across as clunky and poorly planned, much like Tales from the Dark Side's more serious episodes.
The narrative that weaves the short stories together is a strange one. Three drug dealers go to a funeral home to pick up drugs from a mortician, who claims to have found a stack of drugs in a back alley. As the mortician leads the dealers through the funeral parlor, he tells them stories about the corpses that are currently residing in the funeral home. These stories segue into the different segments that comprise the film. Once they reach the back of the funeral home, we're given a rather unexpected twist ending. The twist ending doesn't make a lot of sense, because there was no subtle buildup to it, but it was still a great creepy ending to finish the film. The scenes in the funeral home aren't all that great, though. The mortician is incredibly hammy, drawing overly long breaths between sentences for dramatic effect, and trying to hoarsely whisper his lines in an attempt to be creepy. Other than that, this is a fairly solid narrative; it serves its purpose and ties all the segments together.
The first story of the film is probably the best of the four. The mortician shows the drug dealers the body of a man he claims died from insanity. This leads into a story about some corrupt policemen who kill a senator that was out to stop crooked cops. A rookie cop witnesses the event, and quits the force. Weeks later he hears a voice telling him to bring the cops to the senator's grave. The rookie does so, and when the police arrive, the body of the senator comes back from the dead and gets revenge on the cops that killed him. It's then revealed that this all happened inside the rookie's head and that he's now in a mental institution for murdering the policemen. Out of the four stories in the films, this is by far the most serious and suspenseful of them. The characters are set up fairly well within the short span of time, as is the suspense. The special effects are good too, although the last death scene is a bit strange. However, as with the rest of the film, there is an undertone of social issues (In this case, police brutality and corruption) that doesn't quite flow with the horror elements of the film.
The next story could have easily been the best of the segments, but the ending ruined it. The mortician shows the dealers another casket, but this time we don't see the body. This time the story involves a little boy named Walter, who annoyingly whispers all his lines. His teacher suspects that Walter is a victim of domestic abuse, but Walter adamantly claims that he was hurt by a monster. When the teacher comes to visit Walter's home and speak with his parents, he's quickly thrown out by Walter's father, who turns out to be a monster. Ultimately Walter saves the day because he has magical powers that allow him to kill whatever he makes a drawing of. He crumples up the drawing, leaving the stepfather comically twisted into a pretzel. He lights the paper on fire, and we fade back to the mangled and burned corpse of the stepfather, in his casket at the funeral home. This could have been a very good sketch, but again the unpleasant undertones of social issues (this time domestic abuse) take away from the horror elements. The social issue aspect is never brought to light in any of the stories, and never discussed in any form, we're just left with unpleasant undertones.
The third story is the silliest out of the four. This time the mortician shows the dealers a voodoo doll. This segues into a story that involves a former KKK member who is running for governor in the south. He decides to take up residence in a former plantation that was once the scene of a massacre in the mid-1800's. There is apparently a local legend in the town that the spirits of the slaves who died in the massacre were put into voodoo dolls by a local magic practitioner, and the dolls are somewhere in the plantation. The politician refuses to believe the legend, until his PR assistant dies in a freak accident. Soon after, he starts seeing a doll all over his house. He eventually shoots it, but to no avail. A swarm of dolls appear and attack him, which is where the story ends. This is a really goofy segment. The main character is ridiculously bigoted and spews racial slurs constantly. The special effects are equally ridiculous. The puppets are completely mobile, and run around in some fairly decent stop-motion animation sequences, but it mostly looks like rejected footage from the Puppetmaster series. The ending is also very abrupt. Albeit, there wasn't a lot of room for the story to go from there, but it still felt like the story ended too quickly.
The last of the stories is by far the weirdest. The mortician shows the dealers the body of a man they once knew. This leads into a story about a man who is nearly killed in a gunfight, and sentenced to a life in prison. After a few years, he's offered a free pass out if he subjects himself to government testing. He's taken away to a surrealistic and strangely cartoonish testing facility, where's he put in a cage next a Neo-Nazi. The next day the man is taken to a room to be tested on by a female scientist who shouts most of her lines, and seems like she previously worked in community theater. The man is strapped to a table and subject to Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing, except he's forced to watch gang violence layered with rap music. The man is then put in a sensory deprivation room, where he hallucinates about everyone he's ever killed. He snaps back to reality, and in a strange twist is still in the gunfight from the beginning of the story, but this time he dies. The mortician finishes the tale, and it's revealed that the killers were the drug dealers. The film ends with the aforementioned plot twist.
Overall, this is a pretty decent film, but it suffers from shoehorned-in sociopolitical messages. If this were more of a thriller, the messages may have had more of an impact, but the importance is lost amongst goofy horror violence and terrible acting. The first segment is definitely the best, as it manages to create good suspense and some fairly decent characters within the time constraints. The sociopolitical themes are still prevalent, but it's the only segment where it actually fits in with the story. The twist ending at the end of the film is pretty good, too, if not a bit sudden. If you're looking for a change of pace in horror movies, this is good film to check out. But if you're interested in the horror anthology subgenre, the 1982 film Creepshow is a much better place to start.
Enjoyment- 3.5/5
Quality- 3/5
IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114609/
August 1, 2012
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