I once watched the entire saga of Trapped in the Closet on IFC. It was a true train wreck in that it was awful but somehow I could not stop watching. The story was so complicated and R. Kelly was so pretentious that I simply could not make sense of or care about what happened. If the focus was supposed to be on the tangled sexual relationships of the characters, what was that whole business with the mobsters and the train doing in the film? I honestly hoped that someone would get killed since I thought that it might help end this stupid thing. I have no idea how anyone could actually find this mess genuinely entertaining and not just as a "so-bad-it's-good" alternative classic. In conclusion, it's a bad train wreck that you are better off avoiding if possible.

I don't care much for rap -hip/hop music, but i caught this on cable and was Happily Surprised. Every chapter has a surprise ending to it. It's not pretentious and there are several funny parts. The singing and lyrics are amazing. Also i thought that R.Kelly was a really great actor, even a great comedic actor. Several comedians nowadays try to play multiple characters and it ends up coming off like a over the top characterization of real people that isn't funny. I think R. Kelly did a great job of playing different characters without making them so ridiculous it was unbelievable. The characters were believable with just enough parody to make them endearing.

Going into a little bit of a different trajectory here, R Kelly takes his Trapped in the Closet series-cum-music video into less the territory of a surreal string of cuckolded circumstances than that of the dangerous realm of your common gangster story. Well, common for what R Kelly can do with it at least. This isn't to say the second set of chapters isn't at times hysterically funny (unintentionally or intentionally, take your pick), be it with the close-ups shots of the Man With The Gold Teeth, or some more baby-daddy drama at a very "wha" moment. But... there's just something, oddly enough with such a horrible R&B beat going on behind every single repetitive, mockable 'lyric' Kelly gets into, that's a little off at times. I almost found myself actually paying attention to what the f*** these characters were saying, as if (like in the scene at the restaurant) like Kelly means it to be engaging like some convoluted 40s noir. It is convoluted, I'll give it that. After a while, despite knowing who the characters (mostly) were, I didn't even care anymore. Where as in the first dozen chapters there was some continuity to the madness of another "GOTCHA" coming out of a closet or a cabinet or behind a door, this time there's a lot more that's meant to be going on. But it only works in spurts, which are a good few (i.e. just seeing a 'double' Sylvester in his white suit, as if his God character or something), but far in between. I don't mind if it's cheesy or stupid or meant to be wack-a-doodle nuts. For something like this I DO want it to be that way to get all the camp value for a few buck's worth. But if there's no "good" end result, it doesn't click as well. If the first dozen chapters are a finely tuned train wreck, this second set is more like an Amtrak that skids a little on the rails, but stays firmly on its tracks.

When this DVD was coming out, I couldn't wait to get it. I've been listening to R. Kelly music since I can remember and have followed some of his advice on women. (it worked too.) Now I really don't care about his porno and all that legal bs, all I know is that this man can really make a song about anything and still make it a hit. I think people call that talent. Anyways, I buy the DVD, and I sit with my wife to watch it, and I must admit I felt like the movie went nowhere.I mean, the characters were hysterical and I wondered where the hell he came up with some of this stuff, but I felt he was just showing the different characters he can play so some producer would notice and start putting him in movies. Honestly, he was just showcasing his talents instead of moving forward with the story. The first chapters were good, and it was a movie that I could watch over and over but this second one felt hollow.If R. Kelly wants to go out with a bang with this, he should just go with the first characters he had and just tell their story instead of these other characters that didn't need to be in the movie. That's just my opinion and I am rating this kinda because I am an R. Kelly fan through thick and thin and I'm a little bias.