Parents need to know that Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood is a 1996 parody comedy. As the lengthy title clearly implies, the movie is a satire of the slew of "hood" movies from the '90s that tried to convey the harsh realities of the inner city for African-Americans. As such, exaggeration permeates the movie in every form, and is the source of much of the comedy. There's frequent usage of "f--k," "motherf---r," and the "N" word, as well as scenes filled with malt liquor drinking and weed smoking. The father of the lead character encourages his son to drink and drive and then talks of how much fun it is. Gun violence is shown and parodied; however, the scene in which a white sniper shoots and kills an African-American student starting his first day of college feels way too real and far less funny in light of so many mass shootings. The stock characters this movie is parodying are on full display: trigger-happy gangbangers, Korean immigrant owners of corner stores who don't trust their African-American customers, women in the neighborhood who sleep around and have several children from several different fathers, police brutality. There are exaggerated sex scenes, parodies of foreplay in which food and condiments are used for absurd effect. In another a scene, the lead character reads a bedtime story to his father (who appears to be younger than him); it's a sex story from a pornographic magazine that he reads while the teen boy masturbates under the blankets. However, the movie also uses comedy to raise questions of how African-American men and women are portrayed in movies like these, and in Hollywood overall.

Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinki...