Larry Clark's Kids paints urban youth as sexual psychopaths lost in a skewed world of drugs and violence--a wake-up call to paranoid middle class parents to save their children from the perils of the urban jungle. Gregg Araki counters with the erotic nihilism of The Doom Generation, gratuitously endorsing sex-and-drugs-and-alternative-rock without saying much about anything else in the process. In the spirit of Suburbia, Penelope Spheeris' 1984 dramatization of LA's squatter punks, Threat ignores sensationalistic commentary on youth culture with its aggressively DiY approach focusing on issues of race, gender and class articulated by the people it's written about.
A narrative about New York City youth struggling with the "suit"-imposed confines of the adult world, Threat focuses on the friendship of pacifist straight-edge punk Jim and his black revolutionary co-worker Fred, and the people who populate their lives. Jim spends his evenings with a posse of white straight-edgers out to beat down drunk drivers, Katie is a waitress dealing with a voyeuristic neighbor and Mekky is 16-years-old and HIV positive. Fred has a young child and wife to be responsible to while spreading consciousness to hip-hop heads preoccupied with pistols and 40s.
The film flows between these different stories (shot in black & white during the day and color at night), until they come together at a hardcore punk show where violence erupts over a hip-hop kid dousing a straight-edger with his brew. Twenty minutes of rioting and killing, dramatized with crude but effective animated inserts and the sounds of Digital Hardcore, bring the surviving characters to the conclusion that they've wasted their aggression on "the wrong people," a sobering statement which could've used a more subtle exploration.
Threat is a refreshing movie, unafraid to be awkward and honest about the multicultural urban experience of intelligent young adults who are pissed about being placed at the end of the food chain. Filmmakers Nisa and Pizzolo wear their DiY credentials with pride--self-production and distribution gives their Kings Mob collective almost complete creative control of their output.
