Spookthology of Terror Special Edition: Tales From the Hood 2 (2018)
There has never been a better time for a sequel, or reboot, or Shudder television adaptation of Tales From the Hood, Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott’s cult 1995 exploration of the horrors of racism. Cundieff’s sleeper put a Blaxploitation spin on the horror anthology, fusing dark comedy, horror and social commentary in a manner that anticipated Jordan Peele’s spellbinding breakthrough film Get Out and US, not to mention Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone, which asks why a POC version of The Twilight Zone can’t be an official Twilight Zone as well.
Peele kicked off a renaissance in black horror by proving, yet again, that there is a huge, appreciative audience for stories about the black experience that are simultaneously universal in their themes and obsessions.
Horror is famously obsessed with sequels and prequels and telling the same damn story over and over again, preferably with the same iconic bad guy, so when I wrote about Tales from the Hood for the A.V Club a few years back, I wondered in print why a movie with a following this loyal and large never spawned even a single sequel.
It turned out I was asking that question prematurely, because a mere twenty-three years after the high-profile theatrical release of Tales from the Hood, along with a similarly high-powered Hip Hop soundtrack, a low-budget sequel snuck onto home video despite co-writers/co-directors Cundieff and Scott returning alongside Executive Producer Spike Lee.
This news both excited and concerned me. Why hadn’t I heard anything about a late-in-the-works follow up to such a nifty little cult item, particularly if the original creative team was involved? If Tales from the Hood 2 was any damn good why was it being released direct to video instead of receiving at least a small theatrical release? If the world has never been more ready for more Tales from the Hood, why was this new installment flying so far under the radar?
I learned the answers to this and many other pertinent questions watching Tales from the Hood 2. Like many, if not most, direct-to-video sequels Tales from the Hood boasts a budget seemingly only a fraction of the original. Though Keith David has way too much fun in the Clarence Williams III role of Mr. Simms, the spooky tale-spinner whose wild yarns serve as the connective tissue for a series of eerie vignettes, otherwise Tales from the Hood boasts a no-name cast of modest talent.
Cundieff and company did not have enough money to make the film the right way but they went ahead anyway and the film suffers from paltry production values and CGI that is sometimes impressive in its shittiness. But what Cundieff and Scott lack in money and big names in front of the camera they make up for in ideas.
Tales from the Hood 2 is overflowing with provocative ideas about race and class and the never -ending shadow of our culture’s tragic racial history.
Tales from the Hood 2 is overflowing with provocative ideas. Unfortunately some are as egregiously terrible as they are audacious, like the film’s structure, which finds David’s glowering badass telling a series of stories about the human condition and criminality to a powerful new piece of AI called the Robo-Patriot by an evil, Donald Trump-like businessman as part of the robot’s socialization process.
The very first joke in the film could very well be its worse: the evil, money-grubbing, Donald Trump-like racist behind the Robo-Patriot is named Dumass Beach so that after a hundred minutes have passed this feeble gag can pay off in someone—or rather some thing—referring to him as Dumb Ass Bitch.
Oy. The whole Robo-Patriot wrap-around is a bit of a nightmare, in no small part because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for an evil, Halliburton/Blackwater-like corporation to hire a defiant black griot to tell darkly funny stories about the insidious evil of institutional and personal racism to aid in the right-wing brainwashing of a bootleg, off-brand, wannabe Robo-Cop.
Needless to say, the Robo-Patriot is no Robocop. It’s not even Chappie but it is mighty crappy, both in terms of its character design and on a larger metaphorical level. The first story Mr. Simms shares with Robo-Rent-A-Cop is the most powerful and darkly affecting, but before a powerhouse ending it is marred by the film’s signature combination of broad cartoonishness and heavy-handed sermonizing.
The heavy-handed sermonizing comes courtesy of the owner of the Museum of Negrosity, a collection of painful reminders of our racist past and also present, most notably a Golliwog doll, with the exaggerated features and tragic history of blackface minstrelsy. The author surrogate discourses eloquently on the insidious nature of racism and the potent evil contained in cursed items like Golliwog dolls, at one point referencing Marshall McLuhan’s line about the medium being the message.
Being surrounded by all of these harrowing totems of our cultural ignorance and ugliness somehow only serves to make an inter-racial trio of idiots horny. Even though everything about the museum says “Leave while you still can!” they nevertheless break into this most haunted and deadly of tourist traps so that a dumb white sorority girl type can be reunited with a Golliwog doll she adored as a child and consequently thinks can’t possibly be racist. After all, if she’s not racist, how can something that gave her comfort and pleasure as a child be hateful and wrong and unforgivable?
She ends up getting her wish in the darkest, most grotesque manner possible. The final images of “Good Golly” are genuinely horrifying, the stuff of nightmares, the violent revenge of the repressed. It’s just too bad everything leading up to the ending is so clumsy and stiff, heavy-handed and cartoonish.
The second segment, “The Medium”, is similarly sabotaged by a level of broadness that can only be deemed Jeremy Saville-esque. I had traumatic flashbacks to Loqueesha in this tacky terror tale about John Lloyd (Bryan Batt), a John Roberts-like bogus white psychic who is held at gunpoint by some vicious gangsters and forced to commune with the spirit of a pimp turned preacher in order to learn the location of a small fortune.
While possessed with the spirit of various dead people of color, the sham psychic seems to be channelling sassy radio truth teller Loqueesha as much as the dead pimp that is supposed to be possessing his body and soul. Needless to say, reminding me of Loqueesha is never a good thing.
Tales From the Hood 2 doesn’t bother with subtext. Its messages are perpetually on the surface. In the third segment, “Date Night”, for example, a pair of sex criminals who think they’re putting one over on two sexy casual hook-ups go from being predators to prey when they learn that the real monsters are sexual predators whose lust for power and control reduces them to the level of animals.
“The Sacrifice” is even more ham-fisted in its moralizing, recruiting the spirits of Emmett Till and Martin Luther King and a number of other Civil Rights martyrs to teach a lesson to a black Republican opportunist disgracing his ancestors by backing Thomas Cotton, a candidate for governor who is running on a platform of black voter suppression.
With his white suit and folksy ways, it seems like the actor playing Cotton couldn’t decide whether he was Colonel Sanders or Mark Twain so instead decided to play him as a generic old-timey Southern Racist in a cheap Halloween costume.
Like “Good Golly”, the ending of “The Sacrifice” is unexpectedly powerful and moving, on a metaphorical as well as narrative level, but it forces us to endure some seriously lumbering storytelling to get to that place of unexpected emotional power.
I went into Tales from the Hood 2 expecting the worst and while I would hesitate to call the movie good I found it highly watchable, admirably ambitious and overflowing with more provocative ideas than it really knows what to do with.
I would definitely re-up for another set of terror tales, which is good, because Tales from the Hood 3 is on the way and it looks like Cundieff and Scott decided to get in while the getting is good with another horror anthology film, in this case 2018’s American Nightmares, with Danny Trejo as the Clarence Williams III/Keith David figure, in this case a man named Mr. Malevolent.
It’s good to see Cundieff and Scott making movies in this fertile and very timely vein, in no small part because this deeply flawed but sometimes fascinating sequel leaves ample room for improvement.
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