Tubi Tales... From The Hood!

On tonight's Groovy Tubi Doobie Smokin Buff Movie Boof-off, a double feature of scary thrills... and skunky swill. First, i revisit the beloved 90s horror anthology masterpiece, Tales From The Hood, and it's just as DOPE as i remember it being. But then... a looming horror takes shape on the horizon. Run for cover, bunker yourself from.... the terrible modern sequel. This is the true survival horror.

Tales From The Hood



This one’s a video store classic. Tales From The Hood is a horror anthology focused on hood culture and black issues. Something like that could easily be corny and gay but this movie slaps and fucks, both as a comedy and as a series of panic attacks. 

Most anthology films have a few duds but Tales From The Hood has none. The creativity never lets up and not only are all 4 of the stories highly original, stylish and memorable, even the framing story is an all timer. 

The stories are all sharply satirical and honestly pretty ballsy in how they handle social issues. Topics as serious and hardcore as police corruption and child abuse are tackled, as well as segments criticizing both racial injustice and some negative aspects of black culture itself with equal fury. This movie has no interest in being subtle with it’s messaging and it’s not afraid to take a strong moral stance in a way that reminds me of the best Twilight Zone episodes. 

Without spoiling too much about the individual stories, there’s a legitimately spooky revenge tale, a badass and very intense fight with a monster, one of the coolest scary dolls you’ve ever seen, and a sort of gangster clockwork orange send up that goes unbelievably hard. All of this builds to a crescendo as scorching in it’s critique of the thug life as it is in it’s blazing damnation and heavy metal hellfire. 

A+

But an evil smellier hell awaits... a Hell of creatively bankrupt straight-to-streaming sequels. Things are about to get foul. i think i just stepped in... THE SHIT.

Tales From The Hood 2



YUK. DISGUSTING. OH GOD, IT SMELLS. IT REEKS OF ASS.

What the fuck happened? Why did they do this? This 25 years later, Spike Lee produced, BLM bandwagoning, cash-grab doesn’t just spit in the face of the original movie, but of the viewer as well. The problem with making a sequel to a movie about black people in the 90s is that it's no longer the 90s, so doing a movie about black people now has to reflect today's stupid bullshit instead of anything of actual substance. Actually, it doesn't have to do that, but try telling that to Hollywood.

Despite the original film having all the subtlety of a drive by with it’s social commentary, it never feels even a fraction as preachy and on the nose as every agonizing second of this putrid pile. It’s not just that it's “woke” now, it's actually far worse than that. This is that special kind of brain-rot that pretzels in on itself and begins eating it’s own ass. 

There’s no consistent moral philosophy behind the stories, and what moral stances it does take are so nonsensical, self-contradictory, and confusing it feels like being lectured on ethics by Charles Manson. This is not satire. It’s not even social commentary. It’s the bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator, mindless, heartless, soulless trash. 

Awful on multiple levels. On the one hand it’s an exploitative, race-baiting, virtue signaling, propaganda piece, but on the other hand it’s also a stupid fucking piece of shit that totally sucks dick and completely fucks its own mouth. I don’t even know what this movie thinks it’s saying half the time, but i know it's not saying anything well. 

From the moment it starts, you know things are about to get poopy. The opening credits are some cheaply made bullshit with CGI skeletons doing screensaver stuff that looks like a 12 year old's first attempt at animation on youtube.

Then the framing story kicks off, which is so utterly asinine and tonally removed from anything resembling horror that you might wonder if you played the wrong movie by mistake. This has about as much in common with the first movie as I have in common with whitey, which is not a damn thing.

The morgue guy who told the stories in the first movie is back but this time he's played by Keith David, whose performance is the only fun thing in this movie, even if the character no longer makes any sense because nothing makes any sense.

In this one, he's been invited to some military experiment to help program an A.I. police robot to determine... who does crimes? I don't understand, and it doesn't matter. The point is that the experiment is run by an openly racist prison warden who hired the black guy to tell the computer stories about black people so the robot cop (not to be confused with RoboCop, a hero to all races) will incarcerate more blacks.

I have so many questions. Who funded this military experiment, and why is the racist prison guy in charge of it? How did he even know to seek out this master of stories, who for all anyone knows is just a random guy who lives in a funeral home? Who decided that the machine should learn morality from a random guy telling it fables? This shit is so half-baked it makes me feel fully baked, i can barely articulate what my questions are, let alone hope for any answers.

He tells Keith David that the theme is "Black Lives Matter." So that's the framing device. A bunch of people in a tent listening to a guy who for all they know is just a random mortician telling Twilight Zone stories to a computer in the hopes that it will make the computer more racist, so that the guy in charge can have more black people in his prison. 5 minutes in, and it's already abundantly clear that everybody involved in this movie was smoking meth.

The first story is about a white chick and her black friend going to a racism museum to track down an old stereotype doll that she liked as a kid, not understanding how racist it is. The owner of the establishment gets mad and angrily lectures them on how nothing racist can ever be funny or removed from it's origins as a symbol of blah blah blah and these stereotypes were created to denigrate so and so and yada yada, literally who gives a flying fuck?

The movie wants us to side with the museum owner for setting these naïve young people straight about how racism must be constantly dwelled on all the time or else you're a bad person. It's framed like he's in the right for going off on these girls. But to anyone watching with eyeballs in their skull, it's clear that there is no racial tension whatsoever between the black chick and the white chick. They are friends. They came here together. They just want to buy an antique doll, and literally none of this racism shit matters at all.

The attitude of the curator is the attitude of the people making this film, repeatedly shoving the viewer's nose in the most ridiculously exaggerated, hokey depictions of racism and going "SEE!? RACISM IS EVERYWHERE! WHY AREN'T YOU TAKING IT SERIOUSLY? WHY AREN'T YOU DWELLING ON RACE CONSTANTLY AND LETTING IT INFORM YOUR EVERY ACTION? WHY AREN'T YOU LIVING YOUR LIFE SAD AND AFRAID ABOUT RACISM ALL THE TIME? WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID??"

Anyway, this all ends with the racist doll coming to life and killing the white girl's friends, including the black girl, because... they deserved it, I guess. According to this movie, if you're black, and you choose to be friends with a white person who isn't fully educated, conscious, and burdened with guilt about the role that old timey stereotypes before her birth have played in informing attitudes complicit in systemic oppression, then you deserve to die. 10 minutes into the movie, and already it hates white people so hard it accidentally hates black people too.

Then the white chick decides she wants to fuck the doll for some reason, and her stomach explodes with dozens of racist stereotype doll babies. I don't even even know what to say at this point. This is just the first story. There's three more, and they only get worse.

After that there's an amazingly cringe and boring tale about a psychic medium being possessed by guys that some gang bangers shot, which is really just an excuse to have a white actor doing a bunch of accents and talking like a black gangster because that's the closest this movie comes to having humor in it. But wait, I thought finding humor in stereotypes was wrong. Wasn't that what the first story was about? They literally do a whole story about stereotypes being harmful to black people, and then I shit you not, 5 minutes later a guy gets possessed by an Italian dude and the first word out of his mouth is "fuggettaboutit". I can't make this up. This movie is impressively stupid.

Then there's a story about some guys trying to roofie some chicks, but the chicks turn out to be vampires, so i guess those guys learned a lesson. This might as well not even be in the movie, it's barely even a story. Boring, pointless, shitty, and gay. Don't roofie women, guys. Thank God we have Tales From The Hood 2 to teach us that.

All of these are terrible, but the last story... my God.. the last story. I don't think you're prepared for it. I wasn't. But I'm gonna tell ya about it, cause i had to see it, and i need others to know my pain.

The last story is so baffling i can’t believe nobody spoke up and stopped it from being made. I would need a degree in African American studies to even begin to describe all the ways in which this segment is sure to confound viewers of every race. 

This story is about a black republican with a pregnant white wife, who is campaigning to remove voting booths from black districts or something. The white guy he’s running with is such an absurd racist caricature that he comes off like an anachronism from the confederacy. It’s neither offensive nor entertaining because it’s so out of place it’s just fucking confusing. I haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet. 

You see, all of this is interspersed with scenes reenacting the lynching of Emmett Till. In the present, the white pregnant wife is seeing Emmett Till’s ghost, and being told that she doesn’t “deserve” the baby. Writing this is hurting my head. Basically the black guy being a republican is an offense to every black person who ever died horribly in this country, and because he’s not “respecting the sacrifice” of previous generations, he must either sacrifice himself or his wife loses the baby. Again, this is all being told to this man by the vengeful ghost of Emmett Till. 

So then... i don't even know how to explain what happens other than to say that somehow everybody magically becomes racist, and the black republican guy gets beaten to death by cops while the pregnant wife watches overjoyed because she has now also been magically turned racist, viciously shouting a word i only say when it’s funny at the father of her child. Racism is literally a substitute for magic in this movie, white characters flip on a dime and turn into outwardly bigoted maniacs seemingly at random whether the plot requires it or not. 

I genuinely do not know what this segment was trying to say. If there’s a message or moral, I’m not stupid enough to understand it. I don’t even understand what universe this movie is meant to take place in, a world where cell phones and modern vehicles exist but also people are as openly hostile to blacks as if it were the 1950s Alabama. Characters being exaggerated is one thing, but this kind of racism is so outdated it’s cartoonish. Nobody acts like this. 

I can't even fully wrap my head around what i saw here. It feels like a fever dream but i don't know if even i could concoct a nightmare this cruel and hateful. First of all, using Emmett Till like this, putting words in his mouth to shame black people for not voting the right way, is genuinely disgusting.

But what's even worse is the implication that he somehow used his ghost powers to turn everybody racist specifically so that the black republican would get killed. Does that sound like something the ghost of a lynched child would do? Make people more racist and orchestrate the death of another innocent black man? What the fuck were they fucking thinking?

I can’t believe Spike Lee executive produced this, that dude has lost his fuckin marbles. This is the same guy who made Do The Right Thing, one of the best and smartest films about race ever made. This fucking filth right here has a child’s understanding of racism, a moron's idea of justice, and a tenuous grasp on reality, let alone anything coherent, valid, or even worth a shit to say about genuine racial issues. 

And even if it were just that the satire is weak and the politics insane, it would almost be forgivable if, at the very least, there were anything scary, cool or fun to be found in this dumpster of dicks. But there’s nothing. These stories are trash. Nonsensical, idiotic, pointless, tasteless, confused and worst of all.. fucking boring.

F-.

Wow. What a piece of shit. Believe it or not, the franchise actually survived the 2nd movie. There's a 3rd one. I haven't seen it... yet. I don't know if i can bear to see the legacy of Tales From The Hood be dragged any further down into the depths of diarrhea, but someone has to, and we all know I'm the only man black enough to survive the ordeal.

This looks like a job for the Buff Movie Buff...