DON'T BE A MENACE TO SOUTH CENTRAL WHILE DRINKING YOUR JUICE IN THE HOOD (41)

Directed by: Paris Barclay

Starring: Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Tracey Jones, Keenen Ivory Wayans

The Pitch: 'Hood movies get the joke treatment.

Theo Sez: No masterpiece (to put it mildly), but a refreshingly vulgar blast of foul air, especially given liberal Hollywood's endless hand-wringing over the (undeniably) sad state of America's ghettos : after the guilt-trips laid on by the likes of John Singleton it's almost liberating to watch the first five minutes of this movie, in which various people start describing the grim realities of life in the 'hood ("Everyone's a target" ; "Most of us don't even make it to our 21st birthday") before being duly shot dead. It's pretty consistently tasteless - rampant homophobia, a white-haired grandma with a mouth like a sewer, a teen jerking off to a dirty bedtime story, a junkie sucking off our hero (offscreen) in exchange for street directions (a spoof of MENACE II SOCIETY, like much of the movie) - but at least it's preferable to the superficially innocuous, brain-softening cretinousness of something like SPY HARD. Which is not to say it's particularly respectful of its target audience's intelligence : "Man, why you always be dating white women?" asks Gangsta A. "Hey I'm just tryin' to do to white girls what the white man been doin' to us for the last 400 years!" replies Gangsta B. "Yeah, what's that?" says A. "Fuck 'em!" replies B. Thank you, I think we could've figured that last bit out for ourselves.