There's always room for improvement, of course. Both Netflix and Hulu now boast categories for Strong Black Leads, but they don't contain any horror movies. Starz has added a whole Black History Month category, but it leans toward documentaries and biopics of real people, and ignores its own sampling of Pam Grier movies like Foxy Brown.
I think we can still claim moral victory because through my tireless efforts, you can finally watch Blacula and Blackenstein on Amazon Prime. Shudder has also marked the occasion by hosting films like The People Under the Stairs, Bones, and the somewhat boring Ganja and Hess, as well as the movie I'm going to tell you about.
This week's Thursday Thriller is Tales From The Hood.
This 1995 anthology film was directed by Rusty Cundeiff, who also appears as a school teacher with hip (for the '90s) short dreads.
The four stories involve urban terrors such as corrupt police, domestic violence, a Klansman running for public office, and black-on-black crime.
In the framing story, three gangsters (Joe Torry, De'Aundre Bonds and Samuel Monroe Jr.) visit a funeral parlor to pick up some shit from the cigar-chomping, crazy-eyed mortician Mr. Simms (Clarence Williams III). Simms shows them the bodies he has and tells them their stories.
There are a lot of great moments in this one. You see a wrathful zombie with telekinesis. There's an angry hip-hop fueled montage of white supremacist violence. Corbin Bernsen gets eaten by voodoo dolls. My favorite part, though, was watching an abusive father (David Alan Grier) get folded up into a senseless pile of flesh and clothes.
Tales From The Hood streams on Shudder.
I always initially get this one confused with Snoop Dogg's Tales From the Hood.
ReplyDeleteSnoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror. It's animated.
ReplyDeleteTo add to the confusion, Snoop was in a movie in the early 2000s called Bones. I also recommend that one.