But the words are curiously without malice: they’re offered in the spirit of those ritualized black insult games-“playing the dozens,” it’s called on the street-where the participants swap ever more imaginative references to “yo’ mamma.” The Hugheses are like prizefighters snapping the elastic of their trunks and goading their rivals with colorful put-downs. Spike Lee “needs to go to ending school” Matty Rich’s much hyped début feature, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” was “the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen.” And don’t get them started on John Singleton. “We’re everybody’s worst critics,” Albert says. Maybe part of the trouble, they admit, was invited: when it comes to black cinema, they’re not exactly sitting in the Amen Corner. The twins have found their reception among some of their peers less than welcoming. It’s been a triumphant but not untroubled time for the Hughes brothers, whom I met last month at Studio 7070 in Hollywood. Few would have predicted that when Variety published its annual Profit Chart for 1993 “Menace II Society,” which grossed nearly twenty-eight million dollars on a budget of three and a half million, would show up as the fifth most successful film of the year in terms of cost-to-return ratio.

The film critic David Denby heralded the film’s release as “perhaps the most striking directorial debut in the history of black cinema,” a remarkable claim to make for a barely postadolescent duo working in a field comprising, among recent luminaries, John Singleton and Spike Lee, and in a genre-the gangster movie-already well trodden and convention-ridden. They are now twenty-one years old, and are the children of an Armenian mother and an African-American father.

This is the uncanny achievement of the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert, who co-produced and directed the film. You don’t know whether you’re watching a nightmare or the nightly news.

Filmed in an almost documentary manner, the violence seems both over-the-top and unremarkable-and, above all, real. The scariest movie of last year wasn’t “Jurassic Park,” and it wasn’t “Friday the 13th Part Whatever.” It was “Menace II Society,” which depicts a black urban badlands where bored adolescents shoot to kill, and to kill time.

Menace to society full movie