I remember the good ol' days of the '70s, when Blaxploitation, in all forms from action to horror, made the biggest impression of African-Americans in cinematic culture. Way back in the old days, before Technicolor, blacks were portrayed in small roles and even then only as servants, often bumbling ones at that! But, then came the onslaught of such Blaxploitation classics as Dolemite, Blacula, Superfly and the grandest of all: Shaft... Richard Roundtree version, not Samuel L. Jackson. Blaxploitation took a long over-looked piece of Hollywood, the black actors, and put them in charge! The heroes were black bad-asses who weren't gonna take no oppression by no crusty old white folk! The villains were wealthy and deviant white business men, corrupt politicians, and all the other roles that whitey uses in real life to keep down the brothers! Some people looked at these films as racist stereotyping trash that was a step down for the African American culture and just another way that white Hollywood mogul types planned on making the blacks their slaves again... I don't know if that's true, nor do I give a flying jackal fuck! All I know is that I like Blaxploitation and as long as I'm entertained, I won't need to go wipe out any more whole civilizations for a while, okay?!
Anyway, my love for Blaxploitation aside, interest in these movies eventually died out. The plots were pretty much all the same: black good, whitey bad, the film ends with the black dude kicking the white dude's ass and watching the sun set while whitey's woman sucks some big black beefsteak. So, the black part of Hollywood changed with the times. Out went the period of "black vs. white" and in came the time of "black vs. black". Blacks as a culture became the urban stereotype of gangbangers in their macked out El Caminos, dealin' crack and pimpin' hos. Movies like Boyz In the Hood, Menace II Society, Juice and New Jack City were created... I won't even mention Charles Bronson movies. Now, with the rise of these new "urban" films, there had to be repercussions in other genres, right? Though the realm of science fiction was pretty much untouched (Lando Calrissian is still one of the only brothers to go beyond the stars), horror felt it, although only slightly at first. Def By Temptation definitely wasn't to be Samuel L. Jackson's big break out, though I'd like to think it held a part in shotgunning Kadeen Hardison's feeble career into the wastelands of space! Hey Lando, you got company.
Def By Temptation may have been a locked door for other potential “urban horror” films that were shot down as a result of said failure. Later on, Charles Band, the owner of D-t-V giant Full Moon Pictures, would try to cash in on the almost completely passed over genre with shit like Ragdoll, The Horrible Dr. Bones and Killjoy, which just set back the genre moreso... never trust a white guy who films most of his movies in Belgium to do Urban Horror. Between the time of Def By Temptation and Band's stereotype nightmare, there was Spike Lee's Tales From the Hood.
Our film is set up Tales From the Crypt style: an anthology of stories that are all told from a connecting story. In other words, the movie starts out like a movie, but someone or something starts relaying other stories, which become segments in the film... if I've confused you, then sit down and you'll understand. However, I shouldn't have to be explaining this crap to you in the first place, you should just know what an anthology film is and I shouldn't need to explain it! If you require explanation, I suggest checking out Tales From the Crypt, Nightmares and Tales From the Darkside: the Movie, or just getting the fuck off my site! Back to business, three gangstas visit a local funeral home with the intent to purchase some drugs that the mortician stumbled upon in an alley. But first, the kooky lookin' Don King nightmare insists on telling the boys a few stories.
Story #1, "Rogue Cop Revelation”: Despite the incredibly weak attempt at a title, this story is a good one, featuring revenge from beyond the grave, corrupt cops and a zombie! Clarence is a young rookie cop who wants to uphold the law and be a positive role model for the young black kids in his 'hood. But, things go bad when he witnesses some of his fellow cops (white ones at that) beat a black activist named Martin Moorehouse who's been bad mouthing the police force for selling drugs. To help keep their own illegal activities on the down low, the cops beat the man down and murder the poor do-gooder. This would be the time for Clarence to speak out and tell everyone what happened, right? Wrong. Clarence pussies out and decides he can't rat out his brothers on the force for the benefit of his brothers on the streets, so the bastard piggies get off scott-free. So, a disgrace to himself and his race, Clarence hands in his badge in favor of the bottle and becomes a boozer. One night though, he leads the three officers responsible for Moorehouse's demise to the cemetery where the guy's buried. The cops decide that with all that alcohol in him, Clarence's tongue may be a little too loose, so in their best interests they decide that he too needs to have an "accident"... but first, let's piss on Moorehouse's grave! Sure enough, when one of the crackers drains his lizard on the deceased's headstone, it's time for some zombie action! Yes, very few people know this, but pig urine is a very potent voodoo ingredient when it comes to resurrecting the dead, and there's no bigger piece of pork than a cop! Anyway, Martin returns from the grave to exact some revenge. Despite their efforts to shoot the zombie sucka and blow his Nubian ass up, the three all fall: one cop gets a little too "heartless", another "loses his head" and the last one, uhm... well, I can't really come up with even a semi-witty response to describe his death, so I'll just come right out and say it: he's turned into graffiti... voodoo zombies have so many more tricks up their sleeves than your average ghoul! The zombie Moorehouse then chews out Clarence (not literally) for disgracing his culture and the last we see of the ex-cop, he's living up the life in his new home: a padded cell.
Story #2, "Boys Do Get Bruised": Another lousy title, another above average yarn. The center of our tale is a young school kid named Walter who suffers the usual "new kid on the block" problems... and I'm not talking about closet homosexuality or being a faceless shape shifter whose appearance is molded by greedy record executives and pre-pubescent girls. Walt's also got the problem of an abusive father (David Alan Grier) who has demons of his own... and I don't mean alcoholism either, I mean he's actually a monster! But, Walt's not totally defenseless against the big bully, cuz he has some power of his own. Seems Walt can draw pictures of real objects and people and physically affect them via the paper they're on, i.e. by crumpling or tearing it! When Walt shows up at school with bruises and injuries, his teacher is concerned, so he stops by the house to talk to Walt's mom. When he witnesses daddy's violent ways, he's not about to take no more of that shit! So, being the public servant he is, the guy, well, gets his ass kicked by the monstrous parent. But, Walt decides he's been a punching bag long enough, so he draws a picture of daddy and does what he should've done long ago: crumples it and burns it. Fuck the Bible and all their "Honor Thy Father" bullshit! HAHA! It's amusing to watch as David Alan Grier's body breaks and folds in ways it was never meant to before going up in flames! If it weren't 'R' rated, I'd suggest showing this film to young kids in school to teach them about narcing on their abusive parents, not because it's educational, but more because it's cooler than any after school special!
Story #3, "KKK Comeuppance": Another story where Whitey is the bad guy, this tale follows gubernatorial hopeful Duke (Corbin Bersen of The Dentist). There's one little obstacle standing in the way of Duke's goal: he used to be in the KKK. A KKK politician named Duke, as in David Duke? I guess it's kinda witty. Duke's obviously not ashamed of his former alliance with the Klansmen nor his opinion of African-Americans as he makes his political headquarters in a former plantation house that was the site of a slave massacre after the South lost the Civil War. Of course, legend says that a voodoo slave woman put the souls of the slaughtered slaves into a collection of dolls and hid the toys throughout the estate. But that's all a buncha black superstitious crap, right? Tell that to Duke's black-stabbing (get it?) Uncle Tom public relations agent, who gets tripped up by one of the dolls and winds up cracking his skull after a tumble down Duke's staircase. Sure enough, not soon after the "accident", Duke becomes the target of a vengeful rag doll. Duke tries impaling it with the American flag (do I smell symbolism?) and blasting off half it's face with a double-barrel, but to no avail. Even spouting every anti-black racist moniker in the book isn't enough to stop the little ankle biter. Not enough to take down the bigot itself, the doll gets it's partners to help out and it's not long before the racist is munched by 40 or 50 sets of hungry wooden teeth! Not bad, though I think the "killer doll" genre should be left to Full Moon.
Story #4, "Hard Core Convert": Our fourth and final story takes a stab at the black-on-black crime issue with "bordering on plagiarism" Clockwork Orange influences. The main homie is Crazy K: an infamous gangbanger with "crazy" sideburns who our trio of thugs from the wrap around mortuary story seem to know. One night K gets into a little disagreement with some of his fellow "niggaz" and winds up on the receiving end of a few slugs. When we wakes up he's been picked up by the 5-0 but manages to make a plea bargain: if he willingly takes part in a radical new rehabilitation experiment, he'll be let off. So, our new guinea pig is shipped off to an isolated prison area. In his new cage, K meets a white supremacist psychopath who tries recruiting K into his regime with the promise that he and all the other "brothers" who join will be spared and given positions as slaves after the white army takes over the world. K is then hooked up in a restraining set-up that forces him to watch anti-black footage of KKK functions and black-on-black crimes to hopefully end his criminal ways... or drive him mad in the process. In the thralls of the psychosis, Crazy wakes up to find it was all a bad dream... though reality is worse, as he wakes up to get capped in the ass by none other than our three mortuary drug dealers! Hmmmm, that's something of a surprise!
Fed up with the stories, the trio threatens to shoot the evil Don King is he doesn't give them what they came for, and instead he reveals something else for them: their own dead bodies! Yep, turns out the three are already dead and the mortician is, who else, Satan. Shock of shocks, if you saw the original Tales From the Crypt movie, you saw that one coming a mile away! Though predictable, Tales From the Hood was an excellent movie. Lacking the twists of episodes of "Tales From the Crypt" or "The Outer Limits", Hood does the "Tales From the Darkside" thing and instead interjects some more visceral qualities. Usually I can't stand "urban drama", simply because I can't stand over used (c)rap music, I don't have time to decipher Ebonics and everyone's got something to prove... and I thought the South was still fighting the Civil War! With all the chips people carry on their shoulders in urban movies, I could actually fill a Frito Lay bag! But, Tales From the Hood did well at keeping these annoying elements in check, keeping the 'G Factor' to a minimal so as not to alienate the non-urban viewers too badly. The imagery of the film was very slick and the directing was pretty solid, though some of the writing wasn't anything especially new or outrageous. The FX were also nice, especially the scene with David Alan Grier getting folded like a paper doll... only paper doesn't make sounds that brutal!
Even after an excellent film like Hood, the urban horror genre would be booted out of the mainstream the following year, courtesy of Wes Craven and Eddie Murphy's failed project Vampire In Brooklyn. Though many critics enjoyed Tales From the Hood, Vampire In Brooklyn was another story and that just might be the thing that kept many prominent Hollywood studios from producing black films other than comedies and those damn, "young black teen from the ghetto tries to fight his way out and stick up for his little brother and get off the pipe and lay off the 40s and bitch slappin so he can raise his baby in a world full of opportunities that were never available to him"... uggh, gotta catch my breath for a sec. If more urban horror could be like Tales From the Hood, then I wouldn't double up in pain and vomit violently when I see them on the video shelves. Uh-oh, had a stray thought about Killjoy. Pardon me, the porcelain godz are calling...
The Moral of the Story: Rap and hip-hop music aren't the only genres the proverbial "black man" likes to "sample"...
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- It's a good movie with short stories for short attention spans! The gore looks good, the pacing is smooth and there's more than enough lampooning to be had. Fight the power and add a little "counter culture" to your next party!
If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Necronomicon: Book of the Dead or
Street Tales of Terror
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