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A `Menace'ing spoof

At the present moment, no other film genre is as ripe for spoofing as the current crop of growing-up-in-the-hood movies. After all, it possesses all the makings of great parody material -- clearly defined clichés and conventions, with virtual lack of humor and inherent preachiness. This genre is, for obvious reasons, just about the only one that spoofmeisters such as Zucker, Abrahams and Brooks wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.

But someone had to do it.

Enter the Wayans brothers, fresh from their disastrous stab at episodic TV, with "Don't Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood." Their target is the entire Black New Wave, no less, and they make no bones about it: The movie starts out with a PSA-like message ("One out of 10 young black males ...") that promptly dissolves into a maddeningly pointless gag, and proceeds accordingly.

"Don't Be A Menace" nominally follows the misadventures of two friends (the relatively reserved Ashtray and the high-strung Loc Dog), but does that kind of lazily, with numerous asides that eventually overshadow the narration.

The jokes in the movie fall into several categories -- and since there's no actual plot development to consider, we're stuck discussing individual jokes. There's a great deal of inside-biz sneering (a postal truck emblazoned with the "Janet Wuz Here" graffiti, in a nod to "Poetic Justice"). Some of the gags are pretty elliptical (a prominently displayed movie poster that advertises "RoboPimp 3"); some are truly inexplicable -- for example, Ashtray is older than his father. Uh-huh.

For the most part, the film crumbles into a heap of party-time humor in "Friday"'s vein: Grandmother jokes, masturbation jokes, fat jokes, pot jokes, body-part jokes, proudly offensive handicap jokes (at one point, the movie halts for a dance routine that imagines MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" bit as performed by a guy paralyzed from the waist down). And, of course, there's that good old Def Comedy Jam staple, white-guy jokes.

However, "Don't Be A Menace" is probably the first movie whose authors are willing to poke fun at the black filmmakers' vision of their community even more than at the usual pigeonholing of black characters in Hollywood. Of course, the Wayans brothers don't exactly bury the oeuvre of Spike Lee, John Singleton or those other cinema siblings, Allen and Albert Hughes (although they do include a hysterical spoof of the heist sequence from the very recent "Dead Presidents").