Y’all know the tales from the crypt. But you’ve seen nuthin’ yet, cuz here’s the tales from tha motthafuckin’ HOoOD! … and that’s enough of me trying to talk like someone from the ghetto.
Stack, Ball and Bulldog are three young aspiring drug dealers who are on their way to meet Mr. Simms at his funeral home. And this Mr. Simms dude is a trip and as eccentric as he looks, something our homeboys are soon to experience when they get invited to his gothic and dim-lighted cozy home. And I bet the thick layer of weed rips those nostrils hard. Could I have some, please? Anyway, Stack, Ball and Bull are here to buy some drugs that Mr. Simms claims to have found in an alley. Mr. Simms has hidden the drugs somewhere in the house (and let us guess: the basement), but before we go down there, the old man has some stories to tell, all of which are based on the recent dead bodies lying in the caskets. All of them are actually true, of course, because don’t think otherwise. And as Mr. Simms says; Death… it comes in many strange packages.
The first story, called Rogue Cop Revelation, takes us to the gritty urban city streets which you can guess by the title what is about. Yup, police brutality and the every-day racism protected by the badge, and even more protected by the corrupted code that is Blue wall of silence. Yes, that is actually a thing. Protect, serve and God bless America. Here we meet the rookie cop Clarence (Anthony Griffith) and he couldn’t have a rougher start to his job when he one night is out patrolling with his scumbag partner Strom (Wings Hauser) and some other cops. Because Clarence is actually black, you see, and Strom is a first-class, rage-filled racist. Clarence gets set in a corner when Strom and the other cops beat the hell out of a black man for no reason. They beat him so badly till he dies, and then dump him with his car in the ocean by the docks to make it look like an accident.
So what now, Clarence? Do you break the code and rat on your colleagues, or pretend this never happened? He quits his job in guilt and shame and becomes an alcoholic. The comedic elements start to hit when Clarence returns from his grave, by reasons I won’t spoil, and takes his sweet revenge on the cops.
The second story is titled Boys Do Get Bruised, and here we’re in a relatively quiet, middle-class suburb area where we meet the family of four: mom Sissy, dad Carl and their young introverted boy, Walter. He also wears some bruises that catch the eye of his teacher, Richard (played by the director himself, Rusty Cundieff), and he gets concerned about his well-being. Especially when he also gets bullied at school.
Richard tries to have a chat with Walter to ask him how he got those bruises, which are certainly not from the bullies. He says that a monster comes and terrorizes him while being in bed at night. And if we’re to believe him, we’re actually talking about a real boogely monster that he also makes some cute drawings of. The subject here is pretty obvious, here spiced up with metaphors and a batshit crazy conclusion that even Mr. Simms couldn’t come up with. And I also dare to guess that last year’s Cobweb took some inspiration from this.
KKK Comeuppance is the third story, and my favorite. Because…well, I can’t say without spoiling. But what little I can say is that here we have the sweet and short biopic of none other than the white supremacist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. Here he’s credited as Duke Metger as a combination of the neo-Nazi and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, Tom Metger, just to kill two snakes with one stone.
So, here we have the pleasure of meeting Duke, played by an energetic Corbin Bernsen (The Dentist), a pompous and arrogant senator who’s running for governor in Louisiana. As an ex-member of the KKK and all that shadiness, people aren’t happy, and to add insult to injury, Duke is preparing his office at an old, historical plantation. One of the protesters, who had ancestors living there, won’t let that happen, and has a special plan for him that includes, yes you guessed it – Voodoo, which seems to work every time. This one gets pretty wild with some great use of stop-motion effects that would even make Charles Band drool like an infant. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the song Voodoo by Body Count.
Hard-Core Convert is the fourth and final story. And there isn’t much fun to have with this one, to be honest. But it’s a solid and well-made segment, though, that spits some hard red-pilled truths about the black gang communities. It’s another day in the hood when a gang-related shooting episode escalates, where Jerome gets shot, survives and gets thrown in jail. After being in the tank for four years, he gets met by Dr. Cushing (a nice, little nod to Dr. Van Helsing Peter Cushing) who offers him a plea-deal if he participates in an experimental rehabilitation program. He, of course, takes the offer, and what happens next is a more twisted version of A Clockwork Orange, where Jerome gets put into a sensory deprivation chamber to get confronted by all the people he’d killed over the years, all of whom are black. One of his victims is also a little girl. A bleak segment, this one. Now I want some more weed.
But while this was the final story, we have an encore here. And boy, o’boy … nothing can prepare you for this!
And that’s pretty much how far I can go into each segment without spoiling the whole damn thing. But you see the pattern of social commentary here, told with a morbid and great sense of humor. Black humor in the purest form, if you will, where a ridiculous, zany and charismatic Clarence Williams III steals the entire show between the segments with his electric performance as the mortician Simms. He looks like a bizarro version of Samuel L. Jackson who’s just slipped into a pool filled with cocaine. Tales from the Hood is overall a wild ride and a timeless, little classic that seems as fresh and relevant today, much due to the subject matters.
Director: Rusty Cundieff
Writers: Rusty Cundieff, Darin Scott
Country & year: USA, 1995
Actors: Clarence Williams III, Joe Torry, De’aundre Bonds, Samuel Monroe Jr., Wings Hauser, Tom Wright, Anthony Griffith, Michael Massee, Duane Whitaker, David Alan Grier, Brandon Hammond, Rusty Cundieff, Paula Jai Parker, Corbin Bernsen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114609/
Sometime in the late 80s, George A. Romero was invited to Italy to eat pasta and sip red wine with Dario Argento. The result of that meeting became Two Evil Eyes, an anthology of two films, one hour each, based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The original idea was an anthology of four segments in which also John Carpenter and Stephen King was considered to make the other two. However, Carpenter was busy with other stuff while Stephen King, still and forever traumatized by the experience with Maximum Overdrive, had no desire to call himself a “moron” a second time, and thus Four Evil Eyes got reduced to Two Evil Eyes.
Memories (aka Otomo Katsuhiro’s Memories) is an animated science fiction anthology film from 1995, and it is based on three of Katsuhiro Otomo’s short manga stories: Magnetic Rose, Stink Bomb, and Cannon Fodder. While Katsuhiro is best known for his work on Akira (both the manga and the movie), he does have other works that are worthy of recognition, and Memories is one of them. Since there are three segments, I’ll write about each of them separately:
In Raven’s End, Mortician Montgomery Dark manages an isolated and creepy mortuary all alone. After a recent funeral, that of a young boy, Montgomery gets an unexpected visitor. A young woman named Sam has noticed his “Help Wanted” sign outside of the mortuary, and practically demands an interview right away. He decides to give her a tour of the old, creepy place, and Sam shows an interest in the small coffin that belongs to the boy which Montgomery has just performed the funeral for. He starts telling Sam stories about some of the residents of the town, and the weird and unexpected ways they died.
