John Singleton’s 1991 debut Boyz n the Hood is the story of a group of friends com­ing of age in South Cen­tral, LA. After an extended flash­back set in 1984, the film catches up with the boys as high school seniors in the present day. Tré Styles (Cuba Good­ing Jr.) is a soft-spoken vir­gin that dri­ves a wimpy blue VW bug, while his good-for-nothing gang­ster friend Dough­boy (Ice Cube) rides a souped-up Cadil­lac and packs heat. The seri­ous, ded­i­cated Tré has a job and a future, and Doughboy’s brother Ricky (Mor­ris Chest­nut) has real prospects for going to col­lege on an ath­letic scholarship.

“Get off me wit yo’ big four by forehead!”

It’s worth not­ing that the most evil, racist per­son in the movie is a black cop. It’s a dou­ble whammy; as both a police­man and an adult black man, he ought to have been the man the kids could looked up to and relied on the most. Indeed, the one key fac­tor that dif­fer­en­ti­ates Tré from his cir­cle of doomed friends is his role model. His father Furi­ous Styles’ (Lau­rence Fish­burne) uncom­pro­mis­ing par­ent­ing style helps keep Tré from the fates that befall many of his friends.

“You still got one brother left, man.”

Sin­gle­ton him­self has a cameo appear­ance as the totally blasé mail­man that deliv­ers mail dur­ing a front-lawn fist­fight. Boyz n the Hood was Singleton’s first film, notable for being one of the first main­stream movies to tell a kind of story for a kind of audi­ence Hol­ly­wood his­tor­i­cally ignored or exploited. But its rel­a­tively low bud­get also cor­re­sponds to clumsy direc­tion, awk­ward edit­ing, and some crummy act­ing (espe­cially Baha Jack­son as the young Dough­boy). The DVD edi­tion I saw was panned & scanned, a trav­esty that cer­tainly didn’t help. Stan­ley Clarke’s cheesy lite jazz score is sur­pris­ingly awful, and I say that as a fan of Clarke who’s seen the jaw-dropping bassist live in concert.

Boyz n the Hood opens with the sober­ing sta­tis­tic that in 1991, 4 in 21 African Amer­i­can males will be mur­dered within their life­time. But it also ends with the hope­ful epi­gram: “Increase the Peace.”

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

•