Squeakquels: Tales from the Hood 3 (2020)
In one of the few non-My World of Flops/Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club pieces I wrote for the A.V Club during my stint there as a columnist between 2015 and 2017 I penned an essay about my enormous fondness for Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott’s 1995 horror anthology Tales From the Hood and its continuing relevance.
Tales from the Hood grounded the morbid morality tales of Tales from the Crypt in the bottomless pain of racism and slavery and segregation, in our nation’s tragic history of bloody bigotry and hatred.
It was such a potent, provocative idea that it deserved to be resurrected for contemporary audiences.
I concluded my 2015 essay on Tales from the Hood with, “Perhaps if Peele’s Get Out is a hit, it can be followed by a Tales from the Hood reboot (at the very least, the movie deserves the deluxe Blu-ray treatment from Shout Factory) as part of a full-on wave of horror movies about the black experience in the United States.”
That turned out to be one of the rare occasions in which I was right and my fervent hopes pretty much all realized. Get Out was not only a hit, but one of the most influential, important and talked about horror movies of the past fifty years, not to mention one of the best.
Get Out won Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and established him as that rarest and most wonderful of figures: a legit Frightmaster. Peele’s extraordinary follow-up Us proved Get Out was no fluke.
Cundieff and Scott were, in fact, able to piggy-back on Peele’s extraordinary success in proving that a huge crossover audience existed for horror movies that were at once deeply rooted in the experience of being black in America and universal.
That nifty Shout Factory Blu-Ray release that I pined for happened in 2017. A year later Cundieff and Scott’s iconic horror anthology came roaring out of the crypt with 2018’s Tales from the Hood 2, which was full of provocative ideas and memorable imagery but suffered from a low budget.
It was followed in 2020 by Tales from the Crypt 3. The second sequel is so much better than its immediate predecessor that it makes Tales from the Crypt 2 seem like a mere warm-up.
In the film’s wraparound segments the always great Tony Todd plays a sinister father figure evading unseen, unknown dark forces alongside a precocious six year old girl.
To help pass the time, spooky stories are told but in a twist the Crypt-Keeper-like disseminator of fear fables is not the legendarily scary, towering adult but rather a little girl who is not at all what she appears to be.
In “Ruby Gates”, the first nasty nugget, a greedy black real estate developer hires a deranged white arsonist for whom setting things ablaze is a source of tremendous pleasure to burn down the house of a stubborn black family that refuses to sell their home out of fear that have to move will prove too stressful for their basketball-obsessed, Cancer-ridden son.
The arsonist is supposed to work his dark magic while the family is away to avoid unnecessary, unwanted casualties but things don’t turn out as planned and the poor family dies hideous deaths in the blaze.
“Ruby Gates” is a relatively straightforward ghost story about posthumous vengeance and the unconscionable things people will do for money that makes smart, spooky use of the lonely sound of a basketball being bounced in eerie isolation in a way that reminded me of the classic Tales from the Crypt episode “Fitting Punishment.”
The next segment, “The Bunker” takes an uncomfortably close look at the pathetic existence of racist hate-monger Denton Willbury (Cooper Huckabee). Denton lives in a bunker where he broadcasts hate-filled rants against everyone who is not white, Christian, straight and American (not unlike the late Rush Limbaugh) when not finding sexual release with a pile of half-deflated sex dolls of various ethnicities that seem to be his only quasi-human contact.
Denton is the ugly embodiment of racist white America at its most savage and deranged. He’s a monster of a man marinating in hatred, lashing out impotently against a world that he does not understand.
It’s a fiery performance redolent of Michael Parks’ volcanic turn in Red State with a twist ending that strikes an uncharacteristic note of optimism about our country, its thorny racial politics and where we’re headed.
A magnificent Lynn Whitfield channels Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in the next terror tale, “Operatic.” Whitfield plays Marie Benoit, a wealthy, mysterious diva who whiles away the hours watching old footage of herself performing the lead role in Carmen decades earlier, lost in a haze of memory and nostalgia and happy sadness.
Whitfield makes the memory-mad old woman a force of nature, at once sexual and sad and oddly malevolent. It’s a legitimately brilliant performance that doesn’t just elevate the segment; it elevates the movie as a whole.
The sexy young care-taker tasked with attending to the older woman’s needs finds her unwillingness to live in the present, or even acknowledge its existence blood-boilingly infuriating. So she conspires with her ambitious boyfriend to kill the rich old woman and abscond with her valuables.
The final violent vignette, “Dope Kicks”, follows the traumatic travails of a particularly nasty character, a small time criminal notorious for punching people out and then stealing their belongings.
Over the course of his rounds one day this aggressively unpleasant individual comes across a flashy pair of golden sneakers he absolutely must have.
The sociopath’s glee quickly turns to horror, however, when he discovers that his flashy footwear seemingly has a mind of its own. He’s unable to take the shoes off and soon finds himself wracked with agonizing pain, of both the physical and gastrointestinal variety.
The pain-ravaged stick-up artist is haunted by images of angels and demons transporting the dead to paradise and the fiery pits of hell.
Cundieff and Scott are nothing if not moralists. That is one of many things Tales from the Hood has in common with Tales from the Crypt. They’re both about the horrible things that happen to terrible people motivated by greed and lust and selfishness.
But Tales from the Hood goes even further than its inspiration in punishing its sinners. In Cundieff and Scott’s world when someone sins egregiously we literally see them descend into hell.
In Tales from the Hood, hell is not an idea or an abstract concept: it’s a concrete reality, the posthumous, inevitable home of evildoers everywhere.
Tales from the Hood 3 delivers fire and brimstone in its climax, as the villains of “Dope Kicks” and the wraparound segments receive their ultimate comeuppance courtesy of a certain horned dude with a tale and hooves and a thing for tempting people with forbidden fruit.
I was very pleasantly surprised by Tales from the Hood 3. It’s a huge step up from the second entry and could possibly even mark an improvement over the beloved 1995 original.
The over-achieving third entry in the series made me hungry for more Tales from the Hood, either in the form of more sequels or a streaming series on Shudder like Creepshow.
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