Bold, Uproarious ‘Tales’ Takes Aim at Social Ills : Movie review: Funny yet deadly serious, Rusty Cundieff’s film gives a nice boost to the old horror anthology genre.

With his high-energy, scabrously funny “Tales From the Hood,” young African American writer-director Rusty Cundieff recharges the old horror anthology. He discovers in the thriller of the supernatural a means of attacking satirically such real-life evils as drugs, police brutality, abuse of children and women, racism and gang killings that infect society at large as well as black communities.

A powerhouse of a movie, “Tales From the Hood” is operatic, great-looking, fast-moving, action-filled, tough-minded yet often hilarious and bursting with imagination; this contemporary “Dante’s Inferno” has wide crossover appeal.

In a witty turn as a Vincent Price-like mortician, Clarence Williams III serves as the film’s key figure and narrator, when his elegant funeral parlor is invaded by three youthful drug dealers (Joe Torry, De’Aundre Bonds and Samuel Monroe Jr.) to whom he spins the “Hood’s” four cautionary tales. The first tells of the predicament of a young black cop (Anthony Griffith) who witnesses the savage beating of a black activist (Tom Wright) by three white cops (Wings Hauser, Michael Massee and Duane Whitaker); Cundieff is as concerned with black solidarity as he is with Wright avenging his fate.

As for the second episode, it is hard to think of a film that communicates so unsparingly yet not exploitatively the full horror of a child (Brandon Hammond) and his mother (Paula Jai Parker) at the mercy of the mother’s brutal lover (David Alan Grier); Cundieff casts himself as the concerned teacher of the boy who has learned to deal with Grier by envisioning him as a green monster.

Corbin Bernsen has never had such a splendid opportunity to pull out all the stops as a supposedly former member of the KKK running for governor on an anti-affirmative action platform and living in an old plantation haunted by the restless souls, preserved in dolls made by an elderly black woman, of all the slaves whose master chose to slay them rather than set them free at the end of the Civil War. As with Griffith’s cop, Cundieff has no mercy for the slick young black man (Roger Smith) who’s sold out to become the gleefully hateful racist’s key campaign adviser. Also featured is the veteran Art Evans as the story’s prophet figure.

With his final sequence, Cundieff brings together all of the mortician’s tales as a scorchingly powerful prison deprogrammer (a majestically righteous Rosalind Cash) whose behavioral modification for a 20-year-convicted gangbanger (Lamont Bentley) encompasses a collage of archival photo images of white lynchings and tarring and feathering of blacks as a way of pointing up the sheer self-destructive folly and moral outrage of black-on-black killings.

Handsomely designed by Stuart Blatt, strikingly photographed by Anthony B. Richmond and boasting amusing special effects by Kenneth J. Hall, Cundieff’s bold, raw yet uproarious allegory spills over with the language and the violence of the street, but his wit, vision, style and underlying seriousness sustain these elements. With the highly topical “Tales From the Hood,” Cundieff more than fulfills the promise of his first film, “Fear of a Black Hat,” his funny but uneven rap variation on “This Is Spinal Tap.”

* MPAA rating: R, for graphic brutal violence and strong language. Times guidelines: The film is far too intense for children, in particular a realistic sequence depicting a savage attack on a child and his mother .

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‘Tales From the Hood’ Corbin Bernsen: Duke Metger Rosalind Cash: Dr. Cushing Rusty Cundieff: Richard Clarence Williams III: Mr. Williams A Savoy Pictures release of a 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks presentation. Producer Darin Scott. Executive producer Spike Lee. Screenplay by Cundieff & Scott. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond. Editor Charles Bornstein. Costumes Tracey A. White. Music Christopher Young. Production designer Stuart Blatt. Set decorator Amy Ancona. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.