Crude, Chaotic, ‘Menace’ Also Is Hysterical

Slap the plots and characters of “Boyz N the Hood” and “Menace to Society” into a frying pan, heat to a high sizzle, then spray with laughing gas and you get “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” a free-for-all comic spoof that brings the “hood” genre of Hollywood films full circle.

Crude and chaotic, the movie stridently stands every serious theme and anguished emotion from those two groundbreaking films on its ear.

“Don’t Be a Menace,” which opened Friday, follows the misadventures of two homeboys, the goody-goody Ashtray (Shawn Wayans) and his twisted sidekick Loc Dog (Marlon Wayans). When Ashtray meets Dashiki (Tracey Cherelle Jones), an unmarried mother of seven who has slept with every man in the neighborhood, her children all pipe up in unison, “Are you my daddy?”

The movie’s funniest character is Loc Dog’s gray-haired grandmother, a pot-smoking, gun-toting, obscenity-slinging old woman who in the film’s most frantic scene disrupts a church service with a flailing break dance.

“Don’t Be a Menace” is set in an imaginary Los Angeles where the fast-food outlets are called Fatburger and the local convenience stores Guns and Liquor. Beneath the hysteria you can feel the movie’s boiling rage.

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Movie review “Don’t Be a Menace” Location: North Division cinemas Credits: Directed by Paris Barclay; starring Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Tracey Cherelle Jones, Chris Spencer), Suli McCullough and Darrell Heath Running time: 1:18 Rating: R