This movie sucks! Sorry, just had to get that out of the way, because it was my prevailing thought during and after finishing Tales From the Hood 2. The original film is a landmark of Black horror, and it shined a critical eye on the Black experience in America. It is truly dispiriting that this years-later sequel is made by the same creative team (executive producer Spike Lee and co-director Rusty Cundieff). The acting and set design rarely rise to the level of daytime soaps, and the framing device is bizarre garbage. I shouldn’t have to point this out, but an anthology film needs a strong framing device to hang its stories on. I was really looking forward this one, to be honest, because I was expecting something approaching the artistry and nuance of the first one. Instead what we get is shrill and condescending nonsense, a shallow imitation of the first entry.
Let’s start with the lone good thing about this movie: Keith David. Filling the same role as Clarence Williams in the original, David is inspired casting, able to convey menace and unhinged glee at the same time. He even says the word “shit” in a manner similar to Williams, like he’s biting into an apple. He’s brought in to a robotics lab run by, ugh, Dumass Beach – say it out loud – and that name alone should convey the kind of intelligence on display in the writing. Beach is building a fleet of robotic cops called Robo Patriots, and needs Sims (David) to tell them stories, because these robots can not only learn but extrapolate. Beach’s thinking is that myths and legends will help the robots better prosecute criminals, by which he means Black people. Beach is a paper-thin caricature, as are all the characters in this movie. And if you haven’t noticed, the plot is insane and needlessly complicated. Well, let’s get into it, I guess. Crap.
The first vignette shows two friends – one white, one Black – visiting the ramshackle Museum of Negrosity. It’s filled with grotesque golliwogs and ceramic blackface figurines. It’s only here that Tales From the Hood 2 becomes remotely upsetting; this is partly due to the student-film level of lighting, which at least here manages to showcase the ghastly figures on display. The white girl, Audrey, is enamored of golliwog dolls, and demands to buy one in a glass case. She’s informed that it’s basically haunted, like a racist Annabelle. Later they break in so Audrey can steal the doll, only for it to come to life and attack the three of them. Then Audrey gives birth to a bunch of golliwog dolls. TFTH2 bills itself as a horror comedy, but that only works if it’s funny and scary in equal measure. This film is neither.
Next up we have a trio of gangsters beating up a businessman, demanding to know where he’s keeping five million dollars. After he’s accidentally killed, one of the gangsters has the idea of contacting TV psychic John Lloyd (Mad Men‘s Bryan Batt, embarrassing himself) and forcing him to perform a seance. This works, which results in Batt being possessed by every person the gangsters have ever killed. Thankfully his voice is dubbed over, so we’re spared (most of) the unpleasantness of Batt speaking in AAVE. This could make for a fun bit of camp horror, but the pacing is so languid and the acting so wretched that it just becomes boring.
There’s another vignette but I honest-to-God can’t remember it. This movie ended fifteen minutes ago.
The best short – and it’s a low bar – is the final one. It’s not scary, but neither is the rest of the film, but at least there’s something of an idea on display here, even if it does veer into a civil rights PSA by way of A Christmas Carol (with the role of Marley played by a Cornel West lookalike). A Black Republican named Henry finds himself in a rapidly devolving reality, with the cops replaced by Klan Patrol, and a gubernatorial candidate who looks like Mark Twain. He is eventually visited by the ghosts of Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr., the four girls who died in the Selma church bombing, and other figures of the Civil Rights movement. To call this preachy would be an understatement. It’s almost ironic, as Lee’s Da 5 Bloods manages to find a sympathetic character in a Black Trump supporter; here a Black Republican is portrayed as nothing more or less than an Uncle Tom. It aims for profundity at the end, with a violent beating soundtracked by Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit,” but the tonal shift doesn’t work and it’s all just too little, too late.
This is such a bummer of a follow-up to what I consider to be a genuinely good movie. I wish they hadn’t made it; I wish Tales From the Hood had been left to stand on its own. Tales From the Hood 2 isn’t quite bad enough to retroactively tarnish the reputation of the first installment, but goddamn does it come close. Not only is this a bad sequel – as bad as Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, if you can believe it – but it seems as though the principal creative team had never even seen the first film. That’s unforgivable enough, but it’s even more egregious when you remember that this was made by the same damn people.
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