Menace

Released by: Artisan
Released on: 5/20/2003
Director: John Marino

Cast: Johnny Green, Allen Garfield, David Proval, Jan-Michael Vincent
Year: 2001
Purchase From Amazon

The Movie:

Look at that cover art. See that up there? Do you see that bad ass looking dude in the black sunglasses hanging with his pal, brandishing a shotgun? Well, promptly get that image out of your head, because those guys don't really appear in the movie. The cover art claims that 'their rules are written in blood' but after watching this movie, it felt more like their rules were written in poop.

Menace is the story of one Brian Lovero (played by Johnny Green), a small time hustler who gets along just fine selling weed to a moderately sized clientele and running a few scams here and there. Brian has a drunken no good dad and his mom is dead, so of course, he's going to end up a troubled youth and have to turn to the streets.

Well, thanks to the drunken shenanigans of a racist cop named Ron Masters (played by Airwolf himself, Jan-Michael Vincent in quite possibly his most laughable screen appearance ever), there's some racial tension going on in Brian's neighborhood and the black gangs and the local skinheads (a more unconvincing group of neo-Nazi's I've yet to see in a film like this) are sparring. Brian ends up falling in love with the girlfriend of the skinhead leader and of course, gets his ass whupped because of it. So, he turns to the black gang to get them back and win it all for the woman he loves (who he's only known like a day or so by the time this all happens, or so it seems at least) and do the right thing.

The black gang agrees to help him, but they want one thing in return - the want him to kill Jan-Micheal Vincent. And who can really blame them. He's terrible. He's certainly no Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, that's for sure. Don would have kicked Brian in the nuts and stole his woman. End of story. Anyway, if Brian will do this, they've got his back when he ultimately decides to take down the skinheads, and blah blah blah, who cares.

This movie hurt me. Really. I was laying in the fetal position about half way through praying for it to end. I wanted to like it. I really did. I like a lot of small time, low budget indy films and this looked moderately cool from the packaging, but as Charlie Bronson would say, no dice. It just didn't happen. There is little to know reason to care for these characters and most of the time, you want them to just all shoot each other so you can put in something good instead. But, being the resilient reviewer that I am, I stuck it through to the end. And it hurt me.

It had potential. While it may all seem like Romeo and Juliet set in the hood, they could have pulled it off if they hadn't kept resorting to overly cliché characters and horrible, horrible, horrible music. As it ends up, the film comes across feeling contrived and leaving you wanting that hour and a half of your life back.

Video/Audio/Extras:

Menace is presented here in 1.85.1 widescreen. The film looks grainy and muddy with a dull color scheme and a lot of compression artifact problems. This is an astonishingly bad transfer for a film that's only just over a year old. The whole thing looks very gritty and grainy and I don't mean that in a good way, it doesn't add to the atmosphere or realism of the film at all, it just makes it look bad.

Viewers are given the option of Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. Both tracks sound like they're stereo, there's very little difference between the two. Ninety-nine percent of the action comes from the front speakers with only one or two noticeable exceptions that occur randomly. For the most part though, the films horrible soft R&B soundtrack comes through nice and clear during the love scenes while the nu-metal stylings of some Limp Bizkit wannabes ring through loud and clear during the action scenes, and never really obscure the film's cheese-ball dialogue.

Well, Artisan has put quite a few goodies on the disc that are sure to interest you if you dug the movie. Seeing as I didn't, well, they didn't do much for me. First up is a full length commentary with Abel Ferrara (what was he doing here? I still don't really know), writer/director John Marino, and executive producer Johnny Ciarcia. Marino dominates the track, which makes sense considering his involvement in the film, explaining the motives and rationale behind the characters in the film. Too bad this didn't come across in the movie as well as it does in the commentary. Ferrara and Ciarcia are just kind of there, not really adding too much.

Also included are two deleted that scenes that were deleted for good reason as they really wouldn't have added anything to the movie. The films trailer, which makes it look like a Boyz N The Hood style street/gangster movie. Also included are trailers for Livin' The Life, Downtime, and Road Dogz. Oddly enough, all of these trailers have better video quality than the feature film.

Finally, there is a mediocre still gallery included comprised mostly of promotional photos of the actors in character from the film.

The Final Word:

Blech. At least it had a few seconds of nudity. How this ended up in it's OAR with some decent extras and Dario Argento's Sleepless got a barebones, full frame release truly boggles the mind.