Menace II Society portrays urban hood life during the early 1990's perfectly and outstandingly. Unlike Boyz N the Hood, the film gives us an inner perspective on hood violence and the bloody consequences of certain individuals and may I say, they have done it fantastically. The cast members played their role momentously and their performances were exceptional, particularly Tyrin Turner and Larenz Tate.Although the consistent violent scenes, the movie puts realism in several successful ways and that is why this is one of my favourite films of the 1990's. Powerful and poignant.

Black kids in their neighborhood, having absolutely no purpose in life except for hanging out and getting in all sorts of trouble. The movie isn't necessarily bad even though it feels a little cliché. But you don't get too many surprises. Shootings to starts proceedings, more deaths and fights in the middle, and as you can imagine, a few killings at the end. Menace to society doesn't manage to be a great movie because it does not bring anything in addition to flicks likes boys in the hood, or movies of the sort. It is interesting that I saw "Menace to Society" a few days before "Notorious". It certainly helped to build things up and to feel more connected to the theme of the movie: the lives of teenagers that suffer the social inequalities of the country they live in. But apart from the good intention of the director, the movie fails to be anything memorable.

A brutal and thoroughly realistic of life in the afroamerican dominated Watts district in Los Angeles. Depicting the life of one adolescent criminal Caine (Tyrin Turner) with little restraint or hints of glossing over the morality, "Menace II Society" is a harrowing piece and fascinating debut by the Hughes Brothers. Fragmented and chaotic in storytelling, much like the unplanned, unfocused everyday life the plot moves from event to event in a seemingly unconnected fashion, with only Caine being the stalwart throughout. Other characters appear briefly throughout like Caine's drug dealing father (Samuel L. Jackson), his unscrupulous friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate) or Islam convert Tony (Anthony Johnson) fill in point of views, context and give a wider outlook at life in Watts. Events are left touched, but unfinished, as if small captions of reality captured on screen. The key character of the movie is Caine himself, who is equally endearing as he is menacing, dangerous and morally corrupt, an amalgamate of good and evil, leaving viewers unable to fully define the person along such close-minded perceptions.This method of storytelling does make it touch watching, lacking suspense or story-build, failing to connect with the audience. Nonetheless by the final act, when all events seamlessly summarise the life of Caine we receive a really poignant conclusion. The overall impact has somewhat waned through time and the filmmaking deficiencies in cinematography, sound or basic storytelling take away from what is an otherwise gratifying experience.

"We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proved to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy." - Hieronymos II (head of Greece's Orthodox Church) "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King, Jr "Austerity is difficult, absolutely, but it's necessary, for rich and poor alike, black and white." - Frank Campbell"The more things change, the more they stay the same." - Jean Baptiste Karr Albert and Allen Hughes direct "Dead Presidents" and "Menace 2 Society". Both films purport to be "serious" examinations of the trials and tribulations of post-Vietnam African Americans, but in reality function more as giant exploitation films. The influence here is Scorsese's "Goodfellas", which the young Hughes brothers – the perfect age to be seduced by Scorsese's pyrotechnics - attempt to mimic blow for blow. And like Scorsese's film, though absent of his considerable style, the Hughes' work here is thin, melodramatic and sensationalistic, with deaths, screams, headshots, bombast, snorting, swearing and fury schematically rolled out to shock, bludgeon and titillate rather than edify. An entire resurgence in African American film-making would be corrupted in the early 1990s with such films."This is how it really was," the brothers would claim in interviews, positing their early films as a response to John Singleton's (underrated) "Boyz n the Hood". Their films, the brothers claimed, portrayed the reality behind Singleton's supposedly "rosy" portrayal of the African American experience. But time has been unkind to their pictures. And as the baseline for what constitutes "realism" constantly moves, today "Dead Presidents" and "Menace to Society", once touted as being a form of "black neorealism" or "black naturalism", seem hilariously overcooked and gratuitous. And as with all these films, there is little understanding of why our cast of African Americans do what they do, behave how they behave or examination of the power structures and psycho-socio-economic forces at work. (Both films essentially boil down to blacks killing for money; but "economics" is itself the cause of "the problem", stretching all the way from Vietnam to the Slave Trade to the Roman Empire) Still, there are good moments scattered about. "Menace to Society" opens with its best scene, an impromptu robbery/massacre in which a couple of black kids shockingly gun down the Asian shop-workers who insulted them. If disrespect is the root of all violence, we see that here, the larger marginalization of, or systemic disrespect toward, African Americans breeding both feelings of unworthiness and its opposite, a kind of manic need to protect, sometimes violently, brutalized egos. Black culture may have been mocked in the 90s for its "bling", its hysterical materialism, but this, as well as the numerous riots which rocketed across the US in the early 90s, was an understandable "response" to both widespread feelings of neglect and a culture with conflates wealth and worth. One should not have to prove one's humanity, one's worthiness, and when one is constantly forced to do so, pressure builds and one sometimes snaps. What's pertinent about "Menace's" "snaps" is that the victim's of such black aggression are always minorities or other blacks. Meanwhile, white faces are absent from the picture. Society functions in a similar way, Power deflecting hate away from itself – "down" the "social hierarchy" - and onto others. Unfortunately the rest of the picture degenerates into gratuitous gore and violence.Better than "Menace" is "Dead Presidents", which opens in 1968 and attempts to charter the lives of three friends (played by Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and Freddy Rodriguez) from the Bronx. They fight in Vietnam, are abandoned by the state, struggle to make a living, battle addiction and are then drawn to a life of crime.Like "Menance", "Presidents" at time shows traces of political savvy – one of the guards killed during the robbery is himself a Vietnam vet - but sensationalism, cynically employed shocks and thriller set pieces eventually undermine claims to earnestness. Blame Scorsese for this. Singleton's "Boyz n the Hood" was released before "Goodfellas" and so is stylistically somewhat different from most "African American" films of the period.5/10 – Worth one viewing.