The first films of actor-writer-director Rusty Cundieff have displayed qualities typical of a certain tendency in African-American filmmaking in Hollywood in the decade following the groundbreaking the advent of Spike Lee in the mid-1980s. These films--"Fear of a Black Hat" (1993), "Tales From the Hood" (1995) and "Sprung" (1997)--suggest their maker's relatively cordial relationship to recent American pop culture. Thus far, Cundieff seems to have largely rejected the explicitly political, critical and angry approach of his more serious contemporaries (e.g., Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes