‘Tales’ Combines Storytelling, Lesson-Teaching
“Tales From the Hood” makes no bones about what it is - the title even makes a joke of it. The movie “borrows” the idea of “Tales From the Crypt” and re-creates it as a black thing, which at first glance may seem the creative equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct.
Of course, it’s not like “Crypt” was a creative breath of fresh air, and since for the most part this “Twilight Zone” world has been a white thing, “Hood” can just as rightly stand as a work of overdue innovation.
In the end, the only thing that matters about a collection of stories is whether the stories are any good. And by that standard, the “Hood” proves a much more interesting place to hang out than the “Crypt.”
Director Rusty Cundieff (who cowrote the film with producer Darin Scott) devises a clever variation on the Cryptkeeper set-up shtick by having the stories occur as a string of tales told by a mortician to a trio of young thugs when they come to his funeral home to buy/steal some drugs they heard he was holding.
As played by Clarence Williams III (Link from TV’s “The Mod Squad”), Simms the mortician is at once creepy and hilarious. With his blinking, bulging eyes, a vocabulary of nervous tics and an evil gaptoothed grin that no amount of special effects could approximate, Williams leaves the Cryptkeeper seeming as flat and lifeless as an animatronic doll.
Like so many of its peers, “Tales From the Hood” has an obvious social agenda.
From the opening tale involving corrupt and racist cops to the closer focusing on a convicted killer, every vignette - including the story in which all the other stories get told - is intended to have direct real-world applications. But Cundieff never sacrifices storytelling for lessonteaching, and as a result both are more effective.
At its best, as during the story of a teacher who becomes concerned when one of his young students comes to school bruised and drawing vivid pictures of a monster living in his closet, “Tales From the Hood” creates a seamless blend of compelling storytelling and social commentary.
This image - of a little boy crouching terrified in his bed as the monster no one will protect him from rages at his closet door - is the very definition of a nightmare. The monster, meanwhile, is made all the more monstrous by the real-world inevitability of his identity (played with impressive intensity by “In Living Color’s” David Alan Grier).
There are plenty of memorable moments in “Tales From the Hood,” from the silly fun of watching Williams have such a good time delivering cryptic mumbo-jumbo such as “reality is a cornucopia of clashing, divergent ideas,” to the high-camp satire of an ex-Klansman politician wrapping himself in the American flag as an army of tiny slave-dolls take their revenge.
Throughout, the movie is never less than entertaining. And by the time the closing tale, centering on black-on-black violence, climaxes in a fever-dream montage bleeding archival images of Klan violence into news-footage images of gang violence, “Tales From the Hood” is flirting with the power and beauty of revelation.
xxxx “Tales From the Hood” Location: North Division Cinemas Credits: Directed by Rusty Cundieff and starring Clarence Williams III Running time: 1:45 Rating: R