Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
Directed by Paris Barclay
- comedy
- crime
The story
When Ashtray moves to South Central L.A. to live with his father (who appears to be the same age he is) and grandmother (who likes to talk tough and smoke reefer), he falls in with his gang-banging cousin Loc Dog, who along with the requisite pistols and Uzi carries a thermo-nuclear warhead for self-defense. Will Ashtray be able to keep living the straight life?
What it’s like
Bright, sun-washed daylight over lowriders, stucco yards and wide, dusty boulevards, shot in the plain, well-lit style of mid-1990s studio comedy, with a 90s hip-hop soundtrack and quick comic stingers punctuating every scene. Its vibe is loud, irreverent and cheerfully scrappy, a parody of the earnest hood dramas of its day, played with broad slapstick, deadpan asides and a steady stream of crude jokes. The rhythm is brisk and gag-driven, with bits that land fast and scenes that often exist to set up the next punchline. Its emotional register stays light even as its people drift through familiar gang-life storylines, and the central arc follows a naive newcomer trying to stay out of trouble while his relatives keep pulling him back in. Intensity is high in a comic register: gunfire, drug use, shouted slurs and racial jabs, bawdy sexual humour and frequent crude language, with violence played for laughs rather than gore, though it is never gentle. It suits a rowdy night with friends or a late-night laugh, and is for viewers who enjoy spoofs that poke at genre clichés with no restraint.
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