Tales From The Hood (1995)

Chill or Be Chilled.  Yes, that is the tag line.

A funny thing happened when I saw Tales From The Hood at a matinee showing back in the early summer of '95. A woman and her child, a boy of about 6, came in during the credits and took a seat in the row in front of me and my friend. They seemed... out of place.  They sat through the previews - I don't remember which ones, of course, but they were the type that get shown in front of horror movies. Then the opening sequence of the movie began with spooky music and a panning close-up of the skull image from the posters. As the title came up, the woman took her son by the arm and led him to the hall.  We could hear the boy say, "Mommy, where's Fluke?"

The two of them had gone into the wrong theater. They had intended to see Fluke, a movie with a cute golden retriever puppy on the poster. 

Of course, reading the synopsis for Fluke, they might have been less horrified by Tales...

Instead, they wound up at Tales From The Hood, a horror anthology from executive producer Spike Lee and focusing on horror from an African-American perspective. As a framing story, the movie begins with three gang-bangers trying to buy a huge stash of found weed from funeral home director Mr. Simms (played delightfully over-the-top by Clarence Williams III). As he takes the trio deeper into the funeral home to get "the shit," he tells them the stories of some of the deceased in the coffins they passed by.

Ahh, 'the shit'.  You'll be knee-deep in 'the shit'!

 The four stories involve a dead activist out for revenge on the racist cops who killed him, a young boy with a monster in his house, a racist candidate for governor (Corbin Bernsen, whose top billing on this movie is baffling) being tormented by killer dolls, and a young prisoner being rehabilitated, Clockwork Orange-style.

As with any movie steeped in a particular sub-culture of a particular time, the dialogue from the young men in the framing story and the characters in the last vignette are hilariously dated. Now that nearly 20 years have passed, the "gangsta" has largely fallen out of the spotlight, so it's a bit jarring to see that 90s stock character again. You have to just kind of roll with it.

Like a lot of the so-called "hood movies" of the 90s, the filmmakers had a message for the audience. It's essentially the same message as a movie like Boyz n The Hood, but with more monsters. The vignettes themselves are actually more effective than I remembered from a horror movie perspective. Unfortunately, they often feature a moment or two that are meant to be key to the message, but wind up kind of ludicrous. When it has to make a choice, this movie chooses the message over the scares.

Tales... hovers somewhere between a horror story told from an under-utilized point-of-view and a movie that you're supposed to actually think about. But even with heavy subject matter, it manages to stay fun, thanks in large part to the amazing and quotable Clarence Williams III. It's on Netflix Instant - check it out if for no other reason than to see CWIII go to work.