Kracker Jack’d

Directed by: Chad Hendricks

Starring: Julius Golden, John W. Sloan, Bernicia Womack, Vesher Yisrael

Ooh, Kracker Jack’d. What can I say about Kracker Jack’d other than that it’s an hour and a half of my life I’ll never get back?

The new trend in blaxploitation is, apparently, movies with the setup where a ghetto clique gets killed by some freak (if a trend can be established by this and two Leprechaun flicks, that is). The setup in this one: a group of friends (in the “dirty south,” of course) beat the crap out of some white boy who wants to talk gangsta, then go to throw a house party despite being made aware of local lore that the last house party in the town resulted in a lot of killings. The main actors are about as stereotypically ghetto as you can get, with names like Playa, Bling, Swole, Spliff, and Carlton (the latter being a nod to the Fresh Prince prep of the same name).

Somebody’s gettin’ the gas-face

So they throw the house party and some guy in a hockey mask starts to off them. A “white boy,” of course. Somehow, the girl who discovered the first killing didn’t bother to alert anyone to it, as a clock utilized several kills later shows that many hours have elapsed without anyone being notified. I guess she had somewhere else to be, or something. Necrophilia fans will enjoy the scene where a dead guy with a boner the size of the Eiffel Tower gets sucked off and brought back to life (something Karen Greenlee either never mastered or failed to notify us about). Don’t let that anecdote fool you, as noone apparently wanted to get naked in this flick, which makes sense because if you try to have sex in this house you’ll a) get killed, and b) get interrupted by some fat guy in a purple FUBU shirt who’s looking for pot. Finally, someone notices the house is full of dead people and clears the party out, at which point the blatantly obvious plot twist of the killer’s identity is revealed. Then the movie finishes with a boring lecture about how we should all be comfortable being ourselves, the last scene being yet another twist that should be obvious.

Goalie gets stabby

The sound quality is horrible, and I will say I was hoping the inclusion of Spanish subtitles would at least teach me some gangsta expressions in that language — I took German, Russian and Latin but skipped that one, so I could use some Spanish insults in my vocabulary other than “tu padre le gusta hombres jovenes.” Sadly, the translations available included “my nizzle” translated as “amigo” and “nigga please” as “negro por favor.” There was a short dissertation about Janet Jackson coming out of your ass or something like that, which might be useful for a signature file if translated accurately, but I found this nowhere near as fun as repeating the “Here’s to your fuck, Frank!” scene in Blue Velvet in variant languages.Oh, and if you’re hoping to see someone get chopped up with that chainsaw on the box, give that hope up right now. It either never happened or ended up on the cutting room floor.

- Alyx