Urban Menace (1999) review

Dir. Albert Pyun

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

Urban Menace is my introduction to the cinema of Albert Pyun, the late Hawaiian filmmaker who blended kickboxing, martial arts, dystopian settings, and several dozen low-budget flicks over the course of three decades. I hesitate to seek out any more Pyun films until I read Justin Decloux’s book Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, for some additional illumination on the man and his mythos might result in my time being better spent.

Comforting it is, however, to note that even Decloux himself, whose undoubtedly spent hundreds of hours watching and dissecting Pyun’s works, found little merit in Urban Menace. This is a discombobulated affront to filmmaking, although its audacity to reject such integral principles of cinema such as shot composition, logic, urgency, and character development need be studied in depth.

Pyun commissioned Urban Menace as one of three films to be shot in Slovakia, the sole set utilized a grungy abandoned warehouse. Due to clear and obvious budgetary constraints, Pyun used the same actors for all three projects, including Corrupt and The Wrecking Crew. Ice-T, Ernie Hudson Jr., and T. J. Storm are the common threads between the trio. Actors apparently weren’t completely sure what film they were shooting in the middle of production. The same can probably be said if you watch all three of these very short features (all under 80 minutes) in the same evening and then try to recall specifics from any of them.

Urban Menace appeared to suffer the worst fate of Pyun’s ill-fated gangsta rap trio of films, for half of the footage was lost in transit back to the US. This resulted in reused and/or duplicated footage in order to salvage what little there already was. Actors’ faces were superimposed onto stand-ins, and the production being limited merely to two stuntmen rendered much of the action interchangeable and repetitive.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, the play still sucks. The threadbare plot revolves around Snoop Dogg as a ghost of a preacher whose family was murdered by gang-members enacting revenge on those gang-members, including rappers T. J. Storm, Fat Joe, and the late Big Pun. Ice-T serves as the film’s narrator, though he doesn’t provide much context other than in the prologue, where he informs viewers should they be offended by foul language — or sentences like, “you lowlife, piece of fucking shit!” or “die, you no-good lowlife motherfucker! Die, you piece of shit bastard! Fuck you! Rest in hell, you motherfucker!” — then this film will certainly offended you. “Fuck you,” he proceeds to add.

Pyun’s visuals are uniformly ugly. Almost every shot is static, with an annoying lack of movement, and the constant superimposition of Philip Alan Waters’ cinematography renders everything in an irritating black and blue sheen. Cameras mug and monologue to the camera with relentless arrogance. Snoop Dogg leers in the background of scenes, and his presence as a ghost suggests he was merely available for a small percentage of the film’s shoot.

It’s almost as surreal to watch a film as bad as Urban Menace despite the presence of so many recognizable names. One last curious footnote is the fact it was co-“written” by Tim Story, who would go on to helm films like Barbershop and Fantastic Four (2005). Should I ever have the opportunity to chat with Story, I plan on asking him if he included this on his early filmmaking resume, or did he, like perhaps some of the cast, simply treasure the experience as a fever-dream of questionable existence.

Starring: Snoop Dogg, Big Pun, Fat Joe, T. J. Storm, Ernie Hudson Jr., and Ice-T. Directed by: Albert Pyun.