I gotta admit, despite everything (and he sure has bought into some questionable shit) i love me seeing some Snoop Dogg bullshitting around, so yes, have him do a ghetto Cryptkeeper presenting and commenting an anthology of short horror stories themed around an American inner-city ‘hood.
So yes, this is basically a Snoop Dogg licensed “Tales From The Hood”, which i discovered only after locking this into the schedule (and i’ve heard it’s pretty dang good), sorry but we’ll make do.
Yeah, there’s not much to say about the presentation, but i was curious when this showed up on Amazon Prime Video and for some reason has an anime-esque style animated prologue… and yes, it’s because it customary for horror anthologies (as this way they also tribute the old horror comics these films often base their material on), but i was also right, because the animated intro and outro are animated by renowned anime studio MADHOUSE.
Kinda funny because this also predates their work on The Boondocks, though these sequences are stylish but they’re not well animated, let’s be honest, most likely as they were done on the extra cheap, which wouldn’t surprise me, since it’s indicative of the production as a whole.
The animated intro does give us a story framing, showing how Devon, a local criminal, is engaged in a gang war, and after finishing off the other gang leader, Liore, he discovers some stray bullets from that shoout killed his little sister.
He then walks off, meets Liore again, now resurrected as a demon, and he proposes a Faustian bargain, his life in exchange for having his sister brought back, Devon accepts and kills himself by slicing his throat. Impressed, Liore resurrects Devon, branding him as a Hound Of Hell (HOH), and grants him the ability to decide where people will go in the afterlife, a power to use judigiously…
So Devon becomes a sort of “hood demon pimp”, and presents the audiences 3 stories, like a ‘hood themed Cryptkeeper narrator, whom will decide about the souls of the various characters of the stories, but also comments directly and appears during the segways scenes, while followed around by a dwarf and two “demon hoes”.
It sounds fun, indeed, but sadly it’s kinda of an enjoyable crapfest.
It stars off solid, with a tale about a graffiti artist, Posie, whom is fed up of gangbangers and hood criminals, but one days is given by a demonic Danny Trejo the ability to basically “do a Death Note” on the graffiti signatures around the neighbourhood, but she becomes power hungry, and is given an ironic punishment.
But after that any attempt at being even remotely clever with the themes instead of abusing ghetto hood stereotypes with barely a wink and a nod of self-awareness… goes to the crapper, so we get a racist Texan yuppie white boy forced to live with black ex-Vietnam vets that were friend of his father, because otherwise , and after he abuses them mentally and then physically, they snap.
Even with Ernie Hudson as one the vets, it’s so badly paced, has little gore or horror, and it’s just very lazily written, as his the final story, about a rapper, Sod, that gets A Christmas Carol style retribution when the ghost of his dead friend and biz partner, Quon, checking all the rapper gangster stereotypes in such a rush we even get plot holes left to gander at.
But then again, even the first story, the only one with some potential, feels very rushed and unfinished, even if it does have some ridiculous deaths, especially the beer bottle one, which is funny, but doesn’t change how the story selection starts off ok, then derails into garbage as does the writing, with a lot of dark comedy but little in the way of horror, gore, good acting or actual substance, all with this feel of everyone rushing everything, as if they were using the sets and they had less than a day left to shoot this shit before their permit run out.
It feels they did an anthology to try and staple together some unfinished projects, because you’d wished they picked out one idea and developed that, instead of offering 2 half baked short stories and one that feel stretched out, which in itself it’s telling how not good of anthology this is, being silly and Halloweeny can’t be an excuse for everything.
And – as said before – it all looks cheap, very cheap, sometimes bordering on porno levels of cheap, though the effects remain charming, even if hokey, in a “Spirit Halloween” sorta of way, i’ve seen worse, i’ve also seen better looking budget horror film, and less crappy editing.
As expected Dogg does very little, the best thing being how he hilariously shows up to the house of Ernie Hudson’s character from the second story to shot-explode a chihuahua, for funsies; aside from that he’s expectedly sleepwalking his way through his bits, and yet his character is the best thing in the film….which is kind of an indirect indictment of how bad Snoop Doog’s Hood Of Horrors is.
it’s pretty bad, as a whole, yet i can’t really hate it, i can’t when it ends with a music video of Snoop Dogg as the “Cribkeeper” basically recapping the entire movie in a 8 minutes rap song… just in case you dozed off for the previous 80 minutes.
Still wouldn’t call it a “so bad it’s good”, but it might be worth checking out (after you’ve seen other, better horror anthologies) for some fun silly kills and if you like “the Doggfather” persona and-or music.
