Urban Menace (1999) (V)

Director:

Albert Pyun

Writers:

Hannah Blue (writer)
Andrew Markell (writer)

Genre:

Action | Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

Out for revenge.

Plot:

An insane preacher (Snoop Dogg) seeks retribution from the local crime syndicate (Big Pun & Fat Joe)...

Plot Keywords:

Racial Slur | Vulgarity | Revenge | Urban | Urban Drama

Cast

Snoop Dogg	...	Preacher Caleb
Big Pun	...	Crow (as Big Punisher)
Ice-T	...	Narrator
Fat Joe	...	Terror
T.J. Storm	...	King
Vincent Klyn	...	Shadow
Romany Malco	...	Syn
Tahitia Hicks	...	Holt (as Tahitia)
Karen Dyer	...	Jolene
Ernie Hudson Jr.	...	No Dice
Jahi J.J. Zuri	...	Cool D
Rob Ladesich	...	Harper
Michael Walde-Berger	...	Harper's Boss
Michaela Polakovicova	...	Hooker
Ed Satterwhite	...	Crow's Posse

Also Known As:

Urban Renewal (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for pervasive violence and language.

Runtime:

72 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Australia:MA | USA:R

Company:

Filmwerks

A fantastic home video comedy…

…that unfortunately thinks it's a serious film. This is quite simply the most incoherent piece of nonsense ever to come to DVD. No I'm not going to call it a film because it isn't one as it was shot on digital video and has a look which resembles video captured from a digital camera with Pyun's trademark blue filter. In all honesty though, it's not as unwatchable as Crazy Six and the dialogue, the acting, the editing and the fact that you'll probably have no clue as to what is going on makes this absolutely hilarious to watch, especially with the commentary track.

What this video (not, it's not a film) resembles is a home video of a bunch of idiots running around an empty building with paintball guns pretending to be gangsta and going completely over the top with their dialogue and using the f word at the end of every second word. I had no idea who was the good guys or who was the bad guys, if there were any good guys that is. The acting is hilarious, especially Big Pun's mumbling and fact that he's obviously reading off cue cards behind camera. This is one of the worst performances I've ever seen, rivalling only Anna Nicole Smith in Skyscraper and Mario Van Peebles in Exterminator 2. A good 80% of the dialogue consists of the words "f*ck", "motherf*cker" and "n*gger".

Probably the funniest thing is that Albert Pyun comes completely clean about how bad this video is in the commentary. He admits that several members of the cast never met and were edited together to make it look like they were in conversation which is funny, because that is exactly what it looks like. Something which I have suspected he has done in several of his films. He also admits that one of the characters running around in black is actually Snoop Dogg's stunt double and not him, which is necessary if for a second you thought of trying to make the tiniest bit of sense out of this nonsense, because I had no idea this was even meant to be him as it could quite easily have been one of the many gang members. Snoop Dogg was only there for a limited amount of time, he also tells us in case we hadn't already guessed that. Being the first billed character, his face only flashes on and off a few times and then appears at the end, and his stunt double fills in for the rest and believe me, if you don't listen to the commentary you probably won't even realize that the stunt double is supposed to be him. He also tells us that several scenes were the same corridors we saw earlier, just with all the factory mess rearranged and shot in the opposite direction which is exactly what it looks like!

There's also plenty of continuity errors. Such as how did this preacher become so skilled with weapons? In one scene he takes out what I counted to be 17 people in a corridor and apparently has eyes on the back of his head. While viewing it I noticed that one of them even collapses without being shot at in the sea of falling bodies. I could go on and on but it would take all day, so for now I'll just point out the church with the laughable CGI flames!

If you like seeing "filmmaking" at the very bottom end of the spectrum then I seriously recommend you to check out this. Honestly, if enough people see this I think it could be come a Grade Z classic in the future, it has all the makings of it. This video is a joke, nothing more, nothing less and if you have a sense of humour, then this DVD is a lot of fun! There is just simply no way to take this seriously, and the fact that those involved seem quite unaware of it only adds to it.

Oh, and there's a "Disclaimer" from Ice-T at the start but don't worry, much of the stuff he says in that doesn't even happen in the fi…sorry video!