Tales from the Hood

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Four tales centered around various issues involving African Americans including the "thug life", domestic abuse, racism, cop corruption, and drugs. A mortician could have drugs for a trio of gangsters but before giving them what they believe is product, he tells them stories involving corpses in his funeral parlors.

I hope those who are watching Tales from the Hood for the first time aren’t just immediately turned off never to recover from the opening minutes where we meet three gangster street thug stereotypes, smoking the dooby, cutting each other down before entering a funeral parlor ran by Clarence William III (what a magnificent face for a horror film). Sometimes it isn’t about the first impression but the entire package in its entirety.

With any anthology, there’s the typical set up for the stories that lie within. Williams III (really laying it on thick with his crazed expressions and mannerisms) is a mortician visited by three gangster wannabes demanding his “shit”. Drugs for profit. What occurs is Williams III relating stories to them regarding corpses he tends to resulting from the tales he weaves to them. Williams III promises they will be “knee deep in the shit”. He isn’t kidding although they think he’s talking about plentiful amounts of drugs. What he truly means is plentiful amounts of peril. But the stories first.

A charismatic politician named Moorehouse advocates for a clean police department absent crooked cops. A trio of bad cops (headed by a nasty Wings Hauser) beat him senseless in something reminiscent to Rodney King while a fellow black cop is running his plates not realizing until it was too late what the other police officers were doing to Moorehouse.  The black cop is told by his partner never to rat out a cop (or cops), break the code, or report what the others did to Moorehouse. Cop violence involving racism was quite topical when this movie was made, so any horror anthology involving black characters in key roles where bad cops are concerned isn’t a surprise. The Rodney King case will never die, that’s for sure. It was a given this kind of story might wind up in a horror film. Moorehouse was calling out drug dealing at a certain precinct (Hauser and his boys’ precinct), so he made himself a target. Hauser makes sure he is silenced….but the story doesn’t end here. Clarence, the black cop who never reported the violence against Moorehouse, is now haunted by the victim’s spirit, wanting those dirty cops to pay for what was done to him.

So Clarence does what he is told. The trio of scumbags in blue, a shield and uniform they don't deserve, arrive at a cemetery agreeing to follow Clarence to the grave of Moorehouse. Guess what happens after Hauser pisses on his grave? The dead awakens as a rotted corpse of Moorehouse (with contacts that whitens his eyes) rises (or more like "explodes") from his grave after dragging Hauser's partner into the burial plot, removing his heart and placing him in the casket. Hauser and Clarence's former partner high tail it in a police car but escape isn't optional. This is the case where what you see may not be what actually happens. Clarence is guilt-stricken and truly haunted by not doing the right thing. While we see Moorehouse ripping off a cop's head, causing hypodermic needles to levitate and enter the torso of another cop who subsequently becomes "human graffiti art", and questioning why his safety wasn't protected in an echoing voice, Clarence's strait-jacket and padded cell, with some dialogue shared by two guards indicates it could have all been drummed up within the tortured mind of a cop who was sworn to serve and protect and did neither. The prosthetic and makeup work was of the low budget variety, it didn't need to be too truly authentic in a Greg Nicotero vein due to the idea of what we were witnessing being a delusion instead of actual.

"Sometimes reality is just a matter of perception."

"Can we just get our shit and go?"

The second tale is extremely unsettling, at times incredibly hard to watch due to horrible domestic violence towards a woman and her child. It puts a spin (very inventive and truly at topical as the first tale on racism) on the "monster from behind the door", a nightmare for many children. Sadly and tragically, this tale's realistic threat is all too common. David Alan Grier, known as a very funny comedian on In Living Color, makes for a truly vile and despicable piece of work as a step father who is the very definition of a human monster. Walter is a little boy new to school and his concerned school teacher worries of his health at the child has bruises and injuries.

Drawing the monster, little Walter's school teacher confronts his mother, and soon the step father. What happens is a very violent series of events where a unique ability to hurt those that abuse him through the damage to his portraits on paper allows the abused to get revenge on the abuser. This will not be the easiest tale to get through due to what happens to innocents weaker than the abuser, but domestic violence is an epidemic that doesn't always have the positive resolution...right the opposite. However, this tale is satisfying in that it allows you to see a heinous individual turned into a human pretzel! You have to go with it, as this is a fantasy of "only if this could happen", but I think the monster in this film is just as scary as any creature that might pop out from the closet or under the bed.

"This doll is a way station for lost souls."

The silly third tale is the Zuni Doll of Tales from the Hood. Updated as a parable on a racist politician choosing the wrong plantation house to set up as his campaign headquarters and place of residence, Corbin Bernsen is soon terrorized by voodoo dolls holding the souls of black slaves murdered in cold blood by their former owner (who ran the plantation during the era of the Civil War). His black campaign manager bites the dust by tripping over an old voodoo doll, falling down the stairs and this is the catalyst in Bernsen's descent into a nightmare. All the racist feelings he harbors surface while he tries to rid himself of the doll, but a painting with the creator (and voodoo practitioner) of it (and others like it) soon shows that missing figures once there are soon coming after him!

This, like the first tale, is a kind of fantasy awakened. Those rotten racist politicians spreading their toxic views (a right this country allows) or concealing them from the public but still feeling the very racism they try to convince others they no longer have (Bernsen's character has a past tie to the Clan); well one of them is visited upon by souls seeking retribution due to how they were taken out of this life. Bernsen is more of a stereotype in similar fashion to the three gangster thugs or the evil white cops previously seen. He is a stand in for many just like him with vengeance meted upon him.

Although I was a bit disappointed with the ending, I did find the forth tale--about a  loathsome hoodlum known around the streets for killing other black youths that set him off, perhaps getting a chance at rehabilitation in some government funded program within prison--rather fascinating. The focus of this tale seems incapable of changing. Despite being hooked to a machine as if the African American version of Alex DeLarge, the thug spews profanity and vitriol at those trying to help him escape a life sentence behind bars…he appears to be a lost cause.

While the film has tales with characters painted in broad strokes (like Bernsen’s racist governor candidate who calls the little black dolls “niglets”, and Williams III unrestrained histrionics), it does confront issues involving difficult race relations. The horror genre seems to be perfect for going to extremes while drama (look to something like Rosewood which paints whites similarly) is viewed under the microscope a bit more critically. There is this sense of free reign to go over the top. Like Bernsen being eaten alive by the dolls as their creator emerges from the painting in the same rocking chair except in full human form. Or how a body is twisted into a pile on the kitchen floor (yet still able to threaten those who have contributed to his predicament!).

Welcome to hell, motherfuckers.

Williams III is quite akin to say Ralph Richardson in Tales from the Crypt…he takes us along with those in his attendance on a ride through one story after another and then reveals a frightening truth to them. I think the twist of who (what) he is and how they are involved with him is never a surprise to seasoned omnibus horror fans, but Williams III is perfectly cast as the kind of “horror host” in a no-hold-barred performance that just lets him go. He takes to the role like Cujo to the policeman in the barn. He’s a hoot, I thought. But this is a film loaded to the gills with cursing. Foul language run rampant. Be forewarned.