I wasn't even one stop light away from my DVD rental store when I looked at the passenger seat where my two day rental of Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror lay and I uttered out loud, "What the fudge was I thinking?" To caveat my beef before the meat of the review, I will come clean and say that I am not a hip-hop fan. I might find Snoop Dogg interesting and sometimes even fun (when I have come across him on late night television talk shows), but I ain't linin' up at no ticket counter looking to score wristbands for his next concert if you know what I am meaning. His acting is a give-or-take option. He was in horror before with 2001's Bones where he did an ample job of not putting me to sleep, but let's face it, the best that Snoop has ever been was in stupid comedies like Soul Plane and Starsky & Hutch, and in both of those carnations, he pretty much just played himself.
Strike two against an objective review was the fact that Hood of Horror was the fact that it was an anthology. Squeezing three stories into 84 minutes is like trying to squish a marshmallow through a keyhole. Eventually it will get through, but you will wonder at end if it was worth the effort. Like Twilight Zone : The Movie or Creepshow 2, movies that try and crop multiple television length stories into a compilation masked as a full length feature.
Strike three was the detailing of the three stories on the back of the DVD cover. All three stories were about as original as a Lindsey Lohan drug arrest. I immediately thought, "Why should I invest time in a film that doesn't look like it invested time in any creative new ideas?" But there I was. It was Saturday night and the Misses and I just had an argument over who was the better director between John Carpenter and Rob Zombie. She decided to pout upstairs and watch The Devil's Rejects while I retreated to the basement (better known as 'The Dungeon') where the cover art on Hood of Horror won out over any pay-per-view porn that would have been a quick option 2.
If I had my life to live over again
..
Hood of Horror's first story surrounds a young girl's revenge upon the neighborhood where her mother and father fell by way of the 'ole murder suicide number. As young Posie (Daniella Alonso) grew up, it seems her hatred from her environment nurtured inside her. When confronted with three street thugs who mark their territory by spray painting city walls, Posie tries to assert her own foot hold which lands her in the company of the always watchable Danny Trejo who is nice enough to adorn her with a tattoo that gives her the power to erase these hoodlums from the face of the earth in graphic fashion simply by X'ing out their graffiti with red paint. Booooooooorrrrrring! So in about 14 minutes we are mildly entertained as they go down 1-2-3 while stupid one-liners like "What a waste
..of beer" are rambled off with as much humor as a Michael Vick dog park.
Story two didn't get much better. The middle act surrounds an obnoxious heir to a fortune that must live with his father's army buddies for one year before reaping the benefits of his inheritance. The story was so ridiculous and so annoying that I won't even waste my time going into detail. Even the two one-liners "Anyone for Jiffy Pop" and "That's my kind of redneck" were comments that would even make Schwarzenegger blush.
The third and final act seemed to be the shortest and "thank god for that!" As I swarmed in and out of interested consciousness, it seemed the story was about a rap artist that had to pay for all his bad deeds of the past. When a former friend and now undead visitor from Hell comes back for a visit, the rapper revisits his badness and ultimately finds his demise in rather boring fashion. Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame is around for a cameo which was about as out of place as Ozzy Osbourne would be as an English Teacher.
Snoop's Hood of Horror was not the worst horror film I have seen in a while, but it was close. Without any stories worth remembering or scenes worth pausing, it felt like an 80 minute excuse to promote some new hip-hop/rap songs. And if the best part of the film is the animated intro, then you can guess just how downhill and how fast this film fell.
