Tales from the Hood

Clarence Williams III has a way of widening his eyes that suggests he has just remembered something about you that you would prefer he forget. In Tales from the Hood he plays Mr. Simms, a funeral director who lets in three young drug dealers after dark like he’s been expecting them since before they were born. They have come for a stash he supposedly found, and they call it by a four-letter word. Every time they say it, Simms repeats the word back to them with the delight of a wine steward approving a vintage. Yes, he has it. He’ll take them to it. First he would like to introduce some of his clients and explain how each of them arrived.

The setup comes from the EC horror comics of the 1950s and the British Amicus anthologies, where a ghoulish host tells stories about people who get what’s coming to them. Director Rusty Cundieff and his co-writer, Darin Scott, point that old machinery at police brutality, child abuse, Southern politics and gang violence. The result, presented by Spike Lee, improves as it goes, which is the right order for an anthology, though you’d be surprised how few of them manage it.

The opening story is the weakest. A Black rookie cop stands by while his white partners beat a Black city councilman to death. Later the dead man speaks to him from a memorial mural, and the rookie leads the killers to the cemetery. The performances are solid, as is the premise, but the screenplay gives the cops a drug racket the councilman was about to expose. That hands them a practical motive, and the beating plays as melodrama about crooked cops when I suspect Cundieff wanted us to squirm at something closer to home. The councilman himself never becomes more than the thing that sets the plot going.

In the second story, Cundieff casts himself as Mr. Garvey, an elementary school teacher who notices bruises on a new pupil named Walter and visits the boy’s home. Walter says a monster hurts him. Adults in movies never believe children about monsters, and adults in the audience will understand this one long before Garvey does. Still, Brandon Hammond is very good as Walter, and David Alan Grier, playing against type, is genuinely alarming as Walter’s mother’s boyfriend. The story ends with a practical effect by Screaming Mad George that made me laugh and wince at the same moment.

Next comes Corbin Bernsen as Duke Metger, a former Klansman running for governor out of an old plantation house whose owner once tortured his slaves. Local legend says their souls live on in a set of small dolls, and you can guess what dolls do in a movie like this. Bernsen plays Metger at full volume and spits out slurs so absurd they become comic. The louder he gets, the smaller and more frightened he looks, so the joke lands on him. He’s repugnant and fun to watch at the same time, which is harder to pull off than Bernsen makes it seem.

The last story is the best. It’s the only one where I had no idea where it was headed. A gang member called Crazy K guns down a rival, gets shot himself and lands in prison. There a scientist named Dr. Cushing (a wink at Amicus regular Peter Cushing) offers him his freedom if he’ll submit to her treatment. Her laboratory is a castle on a hill, staffed by nurses in lingerie who wheel around gurneys of what are probably not sleeping patients. Crazy K is stripped, shaved and sealed in a sensory-deprivation tank while Cushing makes him look at what he has done, and at what was done before him, including real photographs of lynching victims. Her argument is blunt: a young Black man who kills other young Black men is doing the Klan’s work for free.

That’s strong medicine, but the segment is too strange to feel preachy. Traces of Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond, a little Hellraiser and some David Lynch turn it into a psychosexual nightmare.

Taken as a whole, Tales from the Hood is more topical than Creepshow or HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, and better than any of the Amicus portmanteaus. Fans of any of those should seek this one out.

And Williams is a treat. He plays Simms with equal parts camp and menace, like a Rod Serling who has been sampling the embalming fluid. He should have gotten a weekly series out of it. I would have tuned in.