Don't Be A Menace To The Lawnmower Man. By Stacey Richter IT ALL STARTED with a plan to see Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace. I'd seen the first Lawnmower Man and against all odds, I actually liked it. Special-effects movies are like pizza; even the bad ones are sort of good. But when I went into the theater, I had a cold, dark feeling. There were only four other people there, and two of them were too young to drive. Then the movie started, and from the very first moment I knew something was horribly wrong. Nothing had even happened, the credits had just started to creep across the screen, but I knew: I was in for it. Lawnmower Man 2 starts exactly where the original left off, with the black-hearted villain trapped inside a computer-generated landscape of virtual reality. I can only assume the reason for this was to scrimp on the special-effects budget by using some of the footage from the original to pad out the sequel. There's no other logic to justify the two versions flowing so seamlessly into each other. The sequel has completely different actors and only a few, thin plot lines connecting it to the first. And what a plot! It goes something like this: The Lawnmower Man was once a sweet, mentally deficient guy who mowed lawns. A little boy named Peter gave him a Twinkie. This so satisfied the guy that forevermore, he loved the boy unconditionally. Then some bad people put his consciousness inside a computer where he became smart and strong and tried to rule the world. The boy Peter, whom he loved, tried to stop him. It was the dialog, though, that really broke me. "Gee, you don't seem like much, for a guy who's supposed to be the father of virtual reality!" Peter says, to a grizzled, reclusive scientist. Am I watching Saturday morning cartoons? "Get lost kid! That man is dead!" he replies. And then I did it. I walked out. I cannot describe the euphoria of walking out of a really bad movie. It's like tossing your notebooks up in the air on the last day of school--free, finally free! If you haven't tried it, you're missing out. The only problem is that movies cost seven bucks these days; but luckily, most of them play at multiplexes, and there are other movies just around the corner. I do not necessarily condone the behavior I engaged in next. I slid into another theater down the hall where Don't Be A Menace To South Central While You're Drinking Your Juice In The Hood was playing. I asked the cop standing at the back of the theater if it was funny, and he confirmed that it was. I'm not sure why cops were standing guard at this screening of a light comedy--frankly, it seemed ridiculous. They certainly weren't looking for theater-hoppers. Don't Be a Menace is written, produced and performed by Shawn and Marlon Wayans (from In Living Color) doing an Airplane!-style take-off on the macho "hood" movies of the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, Spike Lee, etc. Not only is the genre ripe for parody, this movie does a great job of it. Shawn and Marlon play Ashtray and Loc Dog, good and a bad brothers trying to stay alive in the big, bad hood. Loc Dog wanders around drinking 40-ouncers of Colt 45 and pontificating on the joys of a dead-end life. Ashtray gets absurdly bad advice from a teen dad who's younger than he is. Both of them get arrested by tight-jawed cops for the crime of being black on a Friday night. The problem with movies like Dracula: Love at First Bite is that vampire flicks have already been lampooned to death. Films about inner-city life, on the other hand, are so earnest, and so self-righteously proclaim their seriousness, that they're ripe to bursting for parody. Probably, the more "hood" movies you've seen to begin with, the funnier you'll think Don't Be a Menace is, since this kind of humor relies on familiarity. But even if you just watch a little MTV every now and then, you can't miss the charm of a send-up of toughness and machismo. I was disappointed when Don't Be a Menace was over because: A) I liked it; and, B) I knew what I had to do. I slipped back into Lawnmower Man 2. Even though I'd missed over an hour, it wasn't hard to fill in what I'd missed--absolutely nothing. Even the final flurry of special effects was perfunctory and forced. At least I can say, with a clear conscience, that the best part of this movie was the Coca-Cola ad that ran before the show. Lawnmower Man 2 and Don't Be a Menace are both playing at the Catalina (881-0616) cinema.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth