At the Movies

I had the displeasure of seeing this abomination of a "movie" last week and have regretted it since. I've seen crazy bootleg movies before, but never anything to this level. I don't know how to explain it without giving the movie away (as if most of you cared if I ruined the surprise), so I will quote what my boy said:

• Cam's character is named Flea, but it doesn't seem to be a Red Hot Chili Peppers reference. Juelz Santana, who somehow gets second billing even though he's barely in the thing and only kind of stands around in a couple of scenes, plays a character named Bandana. Hell Rell plays a character named Hell Rell. In the opening montage, Cam introduces another character as "the hood internet," and I'm pretty sure we never see him again.

• Also in the opening montage, Cam breaks a bottle over a hater's head and then says "no homo" about fifteen times before pissing on him.

• The best part of the movie is the old stock footage of Cam playing basketball in high school, complete with cheesed-out dubbed-in sportscaster voices (one guy yelling "Giles!" over and over). Cam also helpfully points out Mase in the same footage, and we get to watch him cry after Cam misses a game-winning shot (sportscaster: "He missed it! [long pause] I can't believe it! [long pause] I can't believe he missed it!"). In a scene that supposedly takes place the next day, Cam deals weed to security guards and teachers at his high school, and he appears to have aged fourteen years overnight. Needless to say, he looks exactly the same when the narrative jumps forward to 2006.

• You know Cam's African friend is African because he wears a giant white dashiki.

• In one fucking disgusting and gratuitous scene, we learn that Italian guys love chopping up dead bodies. In another, we get to see the dark side of Maria Full of Grace when two Dominican girls working as drug mules shit out plastic baggies full of coke that they swallowed. I almost puked, for real. (Both scenes are played for laughs.)

• When narrator Cam says "My fur game was at an all-time high," we get a series of shots of him walking into a jewelry store with different-colored fur coats, which, admittedly, is pretty awesome.

• For a couple of months after college, I was a furniture salesman at a ghetto-ass East Baltimore discount furniture store, the sort of place that advertises $5 mattresses and accepts Independence Cards and does brisk business on the first of the month. One of the items we offered was the coffee table in Hell Rell's apartment, which I thought was pretty funny.

• Cam's one big acting challenge comes when his niece is killed outside a Papa John's, and he has to react, which he does by making funny faces. Later on, we learn that Cam is a good person because he doesn't kill his enemy's young daughter when he finds her outside the same pizza place; he just spits on her face instead.

• The engine of plot moves something like this: Juelz says, "They trying to take over the block," and the camera cuts to some guys saying, "Yo, let's take over the block." Cam handles this problem by killing some guy in (seriously) a bicycle-by shooting.

• If his mother hadn't told him not to, Cam would've worn all of his jewelry to his grandfather's funeral. Also, in the movie's only musical interlude, Cam delivers his grandfather's eulogy in rap form, and I don't think the song even mentions his grandfather.

• Funkmaster Flex shows up in a cameo as a chop-shop owner who sells Cam a Lamborghini, and he manages to sneak in a Benzino dis. Also, I was disappointed to learn that Cam's Lamborghini has regular doors, not gull-wing doors.

• At one point, voiceover-Cam seems to be wrapping things up: "Yup, that's my life in Harlem. The ups, the downs, the highs, the lows." The movie then goes on for another hour.

• Like Big Boi in ATL, the characters in Killa Season openly discuss plans to deal drugs and murder people over the damn phone. They must not watch The Wire.

• All corner stores pretty much look the same, but I'm pretty sure the one scene that was supposed to take place in Baltimore was not filmed there.

• Best acting job: the guy who gets stuffed into the trunk of a car along with a box of rats: "Aaah! Aaah! Get these shits off me, B! Aaaah!"

• In the movie, Cam charters a jet and flies his entire crew to a Southern strip club. This definitely seems like it was an excuse for the real-life Cam to charter a jet and fly his entire crew to a Southern strip club.

• Also, when Cam discovers that an old friend of his has become a crackhead, he pulls strings to save her and a get her back into school, which leads to the following exchange. Girl: "I got a 3.5!" Cam: "What's that, a BMW?"

It just...ugh, it's n'eriffic at its helm. If you're into bootleg hood movies that look like it took $300 to make with no real plot or ending, this is for you. If things like plot, character development, acting, and logical sequence mean a lot to you, then scratch this masterpiece off your list.

-B