Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice (1996)

How many gags involving offensive portrayals of African Americans can one movie have? This film may have reached the limit.

There was not so much a plot as there was a series of jokes showing black people in a less than positive light. In the movie's first five minutes, two young black men are gunned down. A hysterical mother cries over the body of her 'baby' until she realizes the young man isn't hers, and then she quickly calms down and becomes quite indifferent.

Ashtray arrives in the 'hood' in a car driven by his mother, who wants Ashtray to live with his father. The mother will not be seen again, because, as she says, there can be no positive black women in this movie. The father actually appears to be younger than Ashtray, who recalls at one point in the movie that he used to change his father's diapers.

Ashtray meets a girl named Dashiki, who is described as having more children than Mrs. Wayans. He is introduced to those children, all sitting in a row, some not even black like their mother. Asked 'What do you say?', the children all reply in unison, 'Are you my daddy?' (Despite the presence of children, this movie should not be seen by anyone under the age of, say, 21. At least I saw an edited version.) Later in the movie, Ashtray must decide whether he wants to make a commitment to Dashiki.

About halfway through the movie, either I became immune to the jokes or the movie ran out of creative energy. Or maybe the writers just wanted to give us a rest, because it was desperately needed. But the laughs soon started up again. Some samples of the humor:

-A refrigerator was full of '40', an alcoholic beverage which it seemed everyone drank (even a baby bottle was filled with something the same color as '40'). A water cooler was refilled using '40'.

-In front of a Korean-owned grocery, one of several black men in a car pulled a gun on Loc Dog. Loc Dog had a larger gun. The man pulled out an even bigger gun. Loc Dog opened the back of his truck to reveal a missile labeled 'USSR'.

-At a party, one black man refused to dance with a beautiful black woman, deciding instead that he wanted a hideously ugly white woman.

-Loc Dog did everything possible to mess up his job interview, when his competition appeared to be Ivy League educated whites with the personality typically associated with Harvard. He got the job anyway. I won't say what job, but it suited him.

-A black cop and a white cop arrested Ashtray and Loc Dog just for being black. The black cop seemed to genuinely hate blacks without even seeming aware he was himself black.

-A road test for a driver's license included the license examiner robbing a bank.

I highly recommend this movie for anyone who just needs a good laugh and does not care about quality or being offended.

Fmovies: Renting this movie I was expecting another comedy to the likes of "Class Act" "Booty Call" and "House Party", which were all great movies. But I got so much more.

This parody of movies such as "Menace II Society" Boyz N Da Hood" and "Dead Presidents" was funny as hell.

They really poke fun at themselves to the extreme, making fun of guns, booze and lets not forget the ladies.

I really enjoyed this, it was a movie where you could grab some popcorn lay back, switch your mind off and laugh non stop.

Honestly, you will not like this movie at all if you haven't seen any ghetto movies or don't understand ghetto humor. Like most spoof movies, it won't be funny if you don't know what is being made fun of.

If either of these things are true, see this movie. If not, don't bother. I think that I have never laughed harder than during this movie. One of my personal favorite comedies.

Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice fmovies. This film is funny, just sit back, get backed and let the jokes cover you like a warm blanket. It feels good you know hmmmmmmmmmm....Well seriously, this film for some reason other than being a spoof and having the same actors as Scary Movie, gets compared to the aforementioned film. Although in comparison Don't be amenace is a far superior film. Just remember: cross at the green, never in between

Besides having a title that is funny in itself, Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood is one of the funniest movies this decade. It spoofs such black films as Boyz N' Tha Hood, Dead Presidents, Juice, Menace II Society, and South Central with such hilarity that you'll be repeating its many classic lines over and over again for months. Wayans brothers who started on In Living Clor and made the hilarious 1988 movie I'm Gonn Git U Sucka do it again with this long overdue spoof of movie that are extremely serious. Classic lines and memorable scenes saturate this movie beginning to end. All characters are well acted and comic pacing and sight gags are at a peak not reached since Top Secret or Naked Gun. Multiple viewings add to the fun. Hilarious. I was foolin` y`all! Those was jokes!

I was watching an old "Honeymooners" rerun with a friend and we came to Jackie Gleason's Ralph's inevitable "To the moon, Alice!" expression of frustration with his wife, and suddenly I realized that it WAS inevitable, so why were we laughing, having heard it a dozen times before? My friend pointed out that Gleason's timing - the manner in which he held his slow-burn, the widening of his eyes, the sudden "Bang! Zoom" take off into the line - was what always made it funny. We weren't laughing at the line so much at the performance of it.

"Don't Be A Menace" is the most obvious collection of predictable gags and bits I have seen in a long time, but it is by far the funniest. The Wayans are rather stuck - the genres they parody here have very rigid conventions, so much so that there is usually only one or two gags one can use to mock them - e.g., when a young gangsta warns us that many young men in the 'hood don't live to see their 21st birthday, we all know what's coming next. So the Wayans handle it in a manner that delays the punchline while emphasizing its obviousness. Thus we laugh with them, appreciating the way they pull it off, and recognizing the gangsta genre limit that's getting parodied, rather than at the bit itself.

Just about the whole movie operates on this level, and for this reason has become one of my favorite comedies. The Wayans capture every moment with a dead-on rhythm that blends the gags into a kind of music. Shawn plays the steady bass while Marlon does some wild riffing. Other characters and bits drop in and out like improvisation and sound effects. Keenan Wayans drops in every now and then like the voice on a scratch dub. The tempo could have been a little swifter, but the rhythm itself is excellent.

Comedy like this is very tricky, and I personally didn't think the Wayans' efforts in the "Scary Movie" films were quite as successful - but here they move it right along.

It's rude, it's crude, it's in-yor-face - and it's just a delight to watch.