HOOD OF HORROR 2006 Review

 HOOD OF HORROR 2006.

 

“Hood of Horror” is an anthology of “horror” stories that are supposed to take place in urban settings. 

The dialogue is laughably bad, obviously written by people who know nothing about AAVE, or the speech patterns in the Black Communities in America. I wonder who the intended audience for this was, because it’s out of touch with anyone that isn’t a WASP. Much of the dialogue reminds me of a fan fiction that you’d come across in high school. It’s very cliched and unoriginal.

The film just starts, no real explanation. It begins animated, and someone who turns out to be Snoop Dogg’s character, is seen  mourning over his sister who was accidentally shot. Snoop’s character bargains with a demon to bring his sister back, but at the cost of his life, basically. Snoop agrees to then bring anyone similar to him to the Hood of Horror. From here, the next three stories are live action.

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The first story is “Crossed Out”, a tale about a girl named Posie that gains the power to kill whoever’s graffiti tag she crosses out in spraypaint. She’s bestowed this gift from “Satan” as she says in the dialogue, who is portrayed by Danny Trejo. He gives her a tattoo on her right arm to symbolize this gift. 

Surely, Posie is a nod towards the popular childhood song “Ring Around The Rosie”. Unrelated fact, that song was originally about The Black Death. 

In the story about Posie, you see a flashback about how her father kills her mother. Posie was a child when this happens, and the actor they used looks nothing like the actor who plays the character as an adult. I had to take a minute to realize that the child in the memory was the character. They look nothing alike! The dad paints “RIP” into the head of her mother and says, “See babygirl, it’s like your fingerpaints!”. The audacity!

The first guy dies when he accidentally shoots himself in the pants.

When the second guy dies, Posie says, “What a waste…of beer.” Then sneers. I rolled my eyes because not only was the line terrible, the actress was so monotone and terrible, it made me hate it even more. The third guy gets strangled by a telephone cord in a telephone booth, showing how something like that could never happen today. 

Just as I was thinking, “If she does this to other people, wouldn’t other people do it back to her?”, Posie is seen tagging a wall with her name. Danny Trejo appears and chastises her for ruining a blank canvas, instead of creating real art. He summons the undead versions of the 3 guys killed before, and one of them smashes a bottle through her skull. The makeup effects here were crazy, as blood spurted through her head. 

Later, a giant painting of red posies is unveiled on a wall, and it’s claimed that Posie had to “move on” to the community. The blood presumably making up the painting. Snoop Dogg appears and pulls an eye out of the wall, Posie joining the Hood of Horror. 

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The second story is “The Scumlord”. A terrible story about how a racist Texan is supposed to live in the same house as his father’s black tenants/old war buddies for a year, in order to get his inheritance. The idea was stupid, because for one, why didn’t any of those men have their place with a VA loan? Unless they were more than “roommates” that lived together. 

It’s revealed that the Texan actually killed his father drunk driving one day, impaling his father on a horned license plate of his. The stereotypes are off the wall in this story, and quickly become insufferable. What could have been used to make good jokes, was just cliche after cliche of “Texas is racist”. It was clearly a story done by somebody that has never spent more than a week in the state. There’s nothing about HEB or Blue Bell Ice Cream. It’s just  terrible “southern” accents, cowboy hats, and confederate flag underwear. If they wanted to make it believable, the least they could have done was make the Texans’ girlfriend a thick latina who cooks tacos. 

The more the story went on, the less interested in it I became. I started to scroll through instagram at one point, and nearly turned the movie off. I couldn’t stand the stereotypes on both sides, from Black and White. The military stereotype of veterans always talking like they’re in war made this story even harder to finish.

What was really shocking about this one, was once again, we encounter someone’s thinly disguised fetish. The Texan’s girlfriend is seen tied up in bed, her stomach bloated, as she had been force fed all of the caviar in their room. She is then gas masked and force fed more caviar, until her stomach literally bursts. When I saw this scene, I had my hands over my face, shocked that something like this was so blatantly in the film. Men force feeding women is a fetish. I am so shocked this was able to fly in the film. 

Not long after, the Texan, who is tied up in a chair, is sent backwards down the the stairs and his neck is punctured. He dies, and you see Snoop Dogg take his head to the Hood of Horror, along with the girlfriend’s body. 

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The third story is by far the best one, titled “Rapsody Askew”. It’s about a rapper that is seen praying to God about finding his calling, and promising to basically thank the lord if he makes it big. The rapper, known as SOD, meets a guy named Quan, and the two form a duo. Quickly, you see SOD make it big, and before an award ceremony, he stiffs Snoop Dogg’s character who asks him for an interview. As punishment, SOD ends up having to face himself, as the manager lady of the building, or so she’s supposed to be, forces him to watch footage of himself and he’s acted in his life.

SOD turns out to be a terrible person, having used his fame to have intercourse with minors, not even feeling bad about it. One line from the character even has him say that he urinated on the girl. I wonder if this was a reference to R. Kelley. 

SOD turns out to have had a huge ego, and owed his fame due to Quan’s smart business decisions. In one piece of footage, Quan was offered a solo deal, by a character played by Jason Alexander. Alexander donns a terrible British accent that was barely even understandable at times. Later, it turns out that Quan was killed in a shooting, when he and SOD randomly decide to go to a Bodega at night. 

It’s revealed that Quan was set up, and the shooting was actually a hit from SOD himself, as he hired his bodyguard. The manager then allows someone into the room, and it’s the undead corpse of Quan. He starts to mess around with SOD, and SOD loses his mind. His bodyguard comes to the room, having round up two girls for SOD to sleep with, but SOD starts freaking out that his bodyguard can’t see Quan. Thinking that he’s stabbing Quan in the eyes, SOD turns out to have taken glass and stabbed his bodyguard in the stomach, killing him. The girls who were taken to the room see this, and run away screaming. SOD then dies in a shootout with the police. 

The movie ends with Snoop Dogg taking all of the characters who died in the stories to the Hood of Horror. It’s a silly ending with some serious elements. 

Overall, I didn’t care for the film much. Each story had different writers, which somehow still ended up with the similar bad styles. The best story was  the last one, as I could see this actually working as a separate movie on its own, if fleshed out properly. I’m sure that there’s a movie like this somewhere. 

I can’t recommend the movie, it was pretty hard to get through. There are a lot of the early 2000’s movie tropes in it, such as the over sharpness, the barely edgy “attitude” that is still “safe for mom”, and the overuse of Sepia filters. Many of the things that I hated about films from this time period are in it, such as the interest in non-Anglo cultures, yet not wanting to accept the nuances within them. I know that this wasn’t supposed to go out there and change the world, but I have a hard time enjoying pieces of media that only keep people back. It just has a very small minded way to presenting humor. 

I give this movie 1 star, and 2 slimes.

 

My video: https://youtu.be/pz-ZQcI724I