Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horrors
2006, USA
Director: Stacy Title
Writers: Jacob Hair, Chris Kobin, Jonathan McHugh, Tim Sullivan
Cast: Snoop Dogg, Ernie Hudson, Danny Trejo, Pooch Hall
Generally, the marquee of Snoop Dogg brings with it a certain standard of quality. Granted, that quality may be pitifully low, but it promises at least a solid contact high and a rap song in which he spells his own name. Sadly, however, neither is enough to save Hood of Horrors, an anthology film of urban-themed stories framed by sequences featuring Snoop as a kind of braided Crypt Keeper surrounded by a thick pot haze instead of fog. Instead, we get a terrible low-budget digital aesthetic, a collection of urban clichés, and a sense of panicked pacing that rushes to get through things before the actors sober up and demand to be fed.
The film begins abruptly, with a strange animated sequence that purports to show how Snoop became the Hound of Hell narrator, but really just demonstrates that director Stacy Title has seen Kill Bill and likes the anime parts. After that comes a tale of urban vigilantism, where Danny Trejo gives a young woman, angry about the rise of gang activity in her neighborhood, magic tattoos that help her kill spray painters, a rather bizarre, literal, and sadly un-ironic interpretation of the phrase cleaning up the streets. Then, we are reminded of how evil white people are, through the story of a cowboy hat-wearing slumlord who tries to evict Ernie Hudson and that guy who played the coroner in Jason Goes To Hell from their tenement house. Afterwards, an aspiring rapper makes it big, but forgets his roots, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Quickly set straight by Lin Shaye and the black guy from Mad TV (no, not that one. The other one. No, the other other one), he goes down in a blaze of glory battling the police just in time for Snoop to play his latest music video as the credits begin to roll.
Unless you’re the kind of person who selects their film purchases based upon the Billboard Urban Charts, there’s really nothing to recommend this film. It strives for both horror and urban comedy, but has nothing of either. The scares are not there, the kills are neither inventive nor gory, and the comedy is not really recognizable as such, instead revolving around the kind of puns that Rod Serling would make at the beginning of Twilight Zone episodes, only without the knowing smirk. The production value is terrible, which is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to horror films, but here it just gives the whole proceedings an amateurish feel. Though the cast is full of familiar faces and talented performers, they are given nothing to do but alternate between mugging and trying not to look bored. Director Title doesn’t seem to care too much about what’s going on, letting everything play out in front of a flat, workmanlike camera, and consequently the audience doesn’t, either.
There's an argument to be be made, for films like this, that they aspire not to reach the status of high or even pop art, but rather strive to entertain, and are created more for the fans than for the critics. That's a valid point in theory, but in practice, it creates soft-core pornography and crappy movies that get sold out of the back of Source magazine, and I don't have time for either. I prefer my porn X-rated and bareback, and my low-rent urban horror able to afford at least a script, and effects marginally above what can be accomplished with corn syrup and food coloring. All in all, Hood of Horrors fails in nearly every respect, unless you’re dying to be reminded of how to spell ‘Snoop’.
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