TALES FROM THE HOOD
CHILL OR BE CHILLED
Yeah, that's really the tag line. Love it.
Three gangsta youths, in search of a stash of shit (I'm assuming that it's not actually shit they're looking for), bust in on a mortician in a funeral home, who tells them four tales of terror before revealing his own little secret.
In the first, a black police officer obeys the voice of a police-slain activist and leads the (white, natch) killers to justice. This is an extremely pedestrian, unimaginative tale that benefits from a minor twist at the end but doesn't really show us anything we haven't seen before a zillion times.
Then, a schoolteacher investigates the home life of one of his young students who shows up at school with bruises and blames them on a monster in his house. This one ain't half bad, and it's rather harrowing if you can accept David Alan Grier as a figure of menace. The conclusion will either put you off or impress the shit out of you (ouch!).
Then, a so-obvious-it's-absurd parody of David Duke is terrorized by a killer doll, Trilogy Of Terror-style. It seems pretty weak at first (and not helped by some really lousy, ham- handed symbolism, like how he beats on a mural of a black woman with an American flag), but somehow grew on me.
And finally, in easily the best tale of the lot, a hard- core gangsta convict is given one shot at redemption though a mysterious "behavior modification" program. This is the story that made me cease my concerns about the film's apparent racism.
And yes, it's probably not inaccurate to call this movie racist. It's about racism too, but really, when every single white character is reprehensible, then it's hard to think of it as anything else. But this last story hits on an important point, first hinted at in the first story - merely "blaming whitey" achieves nothing, especially when the black community is frequently its own worst enemy. And then the mortician's secret comes out, and while it's not that surprising, there's a certain satisfaction in it.
It's a thought-provoking film, and while by no means perfect, it's handled quite well for the most part. The black film industry has targeted a number of genres, but horror seems largely untouched. I for one would like to see more of it.