The aftereffect of COINTELPRO is where the Hughes brothers drop us, like being plopped right into the hot, humid, mosquito-ridden jungle of the Vietnam War, right dead center of a hot mess of fatherless, rudderless, religionless children left on their own to figure out the difference between manhood and materialism.Ĭaine, the protagonist of the story, is a victim of circumstance. After Carter’s 1969 murder on the campus of UCLA, a void in youth activity ripped open, and the Crips and, later, the Bloods formed in South Central. Edgar Hoover developed the covert FBI counter intelligence program COINTELPRO to discredit black men, rip apart families, and introduce drugs crime and murder as the dominant cultural/religious Godhead of a once prosperous and proud community seeking elevation through overt social change. The rise of the Black Power Movement and Black Panther demand for a restructuring of the preexisting social order threatened the Good Old Boys’ way of life, and J. These gangs grew in numbers until the 1965 Watts Riots, after which former Slauson Gang member Bunchy Carter broke from the Renegades Set to form the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party. African American street gangs like the Slausons were formed in response, to protect Black residents from the Spook Hunters. In the 1940s, most of the gang activity in South Central was dominated by whites who, organized under names like the Spook Hunters, sought Black residents to harass and physically assault. South Central was actually a nice, middle class Black community after WW II due to the great migration and ample, good-paying factory jobs. After the opening scene, the Hughes brothers masterfully provide context to contemporary Black on Black violence in South Central LA by showing footage of the 1965 Watts Riots and the police brutality that started it all. The violent, explosive opening with Tyrin Turner playing Kaydee (Caine) Lawson and Larenz Tate as Kevin (O-Dog) Anderson in a confrontation with Korean store owners lets suburban viewers know they are not in Kansas anymore. The genius of the film is that that rage is never exploitative.ĭirected by the then very young and the very sure-handed twins Albert and Allen Hughes and written by Tyger Williams, Menace II Society starts off with a bang (literally) and never takes its hands off of the audience’s jugular.
The genius of the film lies not in its raw expression of young Black rage, however. Audiences were hyped on Menace, hyped like O-Dog on Olde E. Every exchange of gunfire was a shot was heard around the country. In 1993 Menace II Society, like the Rodney King riots one year earlier, showed America the ever-growing social unrest blistering in the South Central LA heat. After that, I knew it was going to be a long summer.” – CaineĬaine said those words like he was reading from a vegan grocery list, calm, composed, but those lines opened a film that blazed the indie box office. You never knew what was going to happen and when.
It’s funny like that in the hood sometimes. “Went into the store just to get a beer, and came out an accessory to murder and armed robbery.