The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2 (hereinafter MtB2) is nominally a sequel to Meet the Blacks, which Wikipedia informs me was a parody of The Purge. Meet the Blacks was released three years after The Purge, but that’s nothing compared to MtB2, which arrives 32 years after The ‘Burbs, which it does not so much spoof as rip off.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around whether or not the pimp who just moved in next door, Dr. Mamuwalde (Katt Williams), is a vampire (Mamuwalde is the name of the African prince whom Dracula transforms into a vampire in Blacula); the real mystery, however, is why anyone would want to lampoon one of the lesser efforts of a pre-Philadelphia Tom Hanks.
The ‘Burbs wasn’t all bad, though; it had Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, and Corey Feldman in it. Who does MtB2 have? Mike Epps, who is to Omar Epps what Omar Gooding is to Cuba Gooding Jr., while Omar Epps is to Cuba Gooding Jr. what Mekhi Phifer is to Michelle Pfeiffer. That sentence I just wrote doesn’t make a lot of sense, but then neither does this stupid fucking movie.
After surviving the events of the first film and becoming an author, Carl Black (Epps) moves his family back to his childhood home in Atlanta. According to Carl, “most black people know about terror” — it is an unfortunate irony, of which the filmmakers are somehow unaware, that in real life many African-Americans living in the US and other countries are much more familiar than they would like to be with true terror, and it’s very unlikely that they will find comfort in this so-called comedy, which in fact almost qualifies as black-on-black crime.
Anyway, Carl watches the news and learns that there has been “a brutal series of kidnappings and murders, all of which were African American or Mexican.”
That is an awkward, ambiguous choice of words; have the kidnappings and murders been committed by or against African Americans and Mexicans? I assume it’s the latter, and if so, was it that hard to add the word ‘victims’ to the sentence? Then again, this script sounds like every third word has been removed and replaced with the word ‘nigger.’
Speaking of words, the movie likes to use big ones such as “gentrification” and “feminism,” but like Wally Shawn and “inconceivable” in The Princess Bride, the filmmakers don’t seem to know the meaning of these terms.
How can a film speak of feminism when its female characters are objectified equally by both the ‘heroes’ and the ‘villains’? For example, when Carl and “black exorcist” Mr. Wooky (Michael Blackson) go to “rescue” the former’s wife, Lorena (Zulay Henao), who is unconscious, Carl pleads with her, and I quote: “Please come back to life. Please baby, I want some of that pussy again.” Meanwhile, Wooky takes the opportunity to lick Lorena’s toes. Really.
As for the racial theme, let’s put it this way: Atlanta — which seems to consist solely of the street the characters live on (which itself is only slightly more realistic than von Trier’s Dogville sets) — figures prominently in Gone with the Wind, a film that, compared to this one, is a paragon of racial sensitivity.
Consider this: Carl calls 911 and poses as a white person. The operator asks, “Is [Mamuwalde] black?” and when Carl answers in the affirmative, the operator says, “we will send five units immediately” — but then the policemen who arrive on the scene turn out to be black too, so I guess the joke’s on, I dunno, someone?
As it turns out, there is only one white character, and he disappears after one (1) early scene. There’s not a lot you can say about interracial relations when there’s only one ethnicity in sight.
90% of Everything is Crap 