Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
‘Two movies for one – For the First Time EVER!’ Flavor Flav would tell me repeatedly while I was waiting for Deion Taylor’s ‘Nite tales’ to begin. I’m not really convinced that’s completely true Flav, but who the hell am I to argue with the wisdom of Flavor Flav? Nobody, that’s who. Flavor aside what we have with ‘Nite Tales’ is an anthology of horror, at least theoretically speaking, which is two movies, as we have been told, loosely linked into one. Was it double the fun or double the pain? Let’s take a look shall we?
Our first story titles itself ‘Karma’ and features a quartet of thugs who are parked outside in a bank located out of the way somewhere in Podunk America, while prepping in their rather fresh '79 Olds Cutlass for the task of holding up this joint. Our rather unsavory crew leader (Kirk ‘Sticky Fingaz’ Jones) has staked out the joint and figures this should be a quick smash and grab since the place has no cameras, one lousy security guard and it looks like it has no alarms. The job goes as expected, assisted greatly by our leaders complete willingness to shoot people in the head, but unfortunately there’s always that one dude in the group who shouldn’t be there, who takes his eyes off the prize and gets shot up for his trouble.
Dragging along their shot up colleague, our anti-heroes are making a fast getaway when their car stalls out. Fortunately there’s a house nearby with the plan being to steal the truck in front and continue on to safety. Unfortunately what we have here are four criminals without a single one of them knowing how to break into a locked car and hotwire it. Remember the good old days when criminals had skills beyond mindless violence? Now they have to knock on the door of the house of these hicks, pretend like they want to use the phone, find the car keys and drive off. The minute we meet these hicks we’re pretty sure that’s not how this is going to go down. Guess what? That’s totally not how this goes down.
Our second story is ‘Storm’ and features a quintet of thirty year old high schoolers drinking and smoking it up while one their crews parents were out of town. Seriously, when girlfriend informed us that her Mom wouldn’t be back until the next day, I was thinking that maybe Mom should get her own house instead of sponging off her grown-ass adult daughter. Only later on did it finally dawn on me these rather ‘mature’ kids were supposed to be in high school. Anyway, these crazy kids decide to play the always popular game of Bloody Mary in the mist of the storm of the century.
No sooner than they play the game is there a knock on the door and a rather demonic looking clown shows up, played by the legendary Tony Todd. Why does a clown show up at this house in the middle of the night in the middle of a monsoon? Why that’s a damn good question my friends. Next to make a sudden unscheduled appearance is a rather suspect looking Cop. Soon all of our ‘kids’ start to die off one by one – days short of receiving social security - with the immediate suspect being the demonic clown, but damn if it doesn’t go way deeper than that. Well… not way deeper but a little deeper.
I gotta be honest with you and tell you that ‘Nite Tales’ was pretty damn silly. However this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t entertaining because it was certainly that as the stories flowed smoothly, the acting was above average, lifted by the always welcome addition of Tony Todd, and it was good profane campy fun. What ‘Nite Tales’ wasn’t was frightening, tense or scary in any conceivable way. I’m not even completely sold that is was supposed to be scary. There was some nice horror type imagery in the ‘Storm’ episode, which was probably the better of the two stories, but nothing that made me jump or even startled me a little bit. Kind of like ‘The Twilight Zone’, only sillier.
Now I am thinking what we could’ve done without in this movie ‘Nite Tales’ was my man Flav hosting the thing. I got nothing but mad love for the pre Z-List Flav… Night of the living Baseheads? Black Steel in the hour of Chaos anybody? But considering this cat railed against Channel Zero twenty some years ago, Flavor Flav IS Channel Zero today. Everything about Flavor Flav SCREAMS Channel Zero in the 21st century. Flav’s mere presence made a silly campy set of stories even sillier and campier… know what I’m sayin’? And considering this movie is the launching point for a series of TV shorts… I gotta tell you, I’m not looking forward to that.
Oh well, lest I be called a ‘hater’ I am happy to see the brother with a job in between seasons of ‘Flavor of Love’. If you’re looking to be entertained a little bit for ninety or so minutes then I do recommend ‘Nite Tales’. If you’re looking to be scared for ninety or so minutes, go out and rent ‘The Exorcist’ one more time.
