After watching Holla If You Hear Me Kill You and Holla If I Kill You, I now know that plain old Holla is the best black slasher flick in the bunch. What I don’t know is, why didn’t anyone try to come up with a title that didn’t use the word “holla?”
So, which is the better of the two Holla If… movies?
HOLLA IF I KILL YOU (2003)
Just because it’s the first Holla movie doesn’t make it the best. Actually, it’s my least favorite. It’s a Polonia Brothers movie, and they are notorious for making bad horror movies.
This comedian named Hollaback gets booed off stage. Repeatedly. After each failure, we watch the comedy act of some better comedian and the audience’s positive reaction. We see the same killer POV footage traveling through the comedy club. Someone gets killed. Then the cycle starts all over. It’s not a horror comedy. It’s horror. Then comedy. Then horror. Then comedy….
The movie is also loaded with interviews of comedians talking about getting booed and audience members talking about having the right to boo them. There’s also a lengthy scene of Hollaback and some other guys watching a television interview with hip hop artists and comedians talking about having their art trashed. Do you think the Polonia Brothers were trying to tell us how they feel when their movies get trashed?
Also, every time he lies in bed feeling worthless (because he’s in this movie), Hollaback gets phone calls from the killer (this is when he’s actually funniest—maybe he should have phoned in his comedy act). There are no scares and all we ever see is the killer’s arm, but the gore is deliberately bloody to compensate.
There’s a hot brawny bouncer and smoldering sexy Latin cop who is on screen for like half a minute and never made another movie so I can’t even find a pic of him to post. There are approximately two women in the entire movie and all the comedians/victims are men.
At the end of the movie, the killer speaks the title of the movie, finding “Holla If I Kill You” quite funny. But honestly, it’s not even unintentionally funny.
Important to note is that some white bartender dude gets a microphone shoved in his mouth. Someone also makes reference to Jeffrey Dahmer. Humor me. This stuff is relevant when I talk about the next film.
HOLLA IF YOU HEAR ME KILL YOU (2006)
The same year that the far superior Holla was released (read about it here), we got Holla If You Hear Me Kill You.
Some big hip hop artist dude is killed in the opening scene. But before he dies, he has a phone conversation with a guy being straddled by a chick, a scene seemingly meant just to give us some ass action.
The killer looks pretty cool, in a black hooded robe with a gnarly skull mask.
The entire movie is about this dead hip hop dude’s posse sitting around a studio talking about his murder, accusing each other of doing it, and having relationship quarrels. Talk, talk, fight, fight, racial slurs, homophobic slurs, misogynistic comments, talk, talk, fight, fight. And it’s all shot with terribly wonky camera work like a bad reality show.
Eventually, someone goes off alone. The kills are the only thing the film has going for it. They’re pretty entertaining with some tense setups and creepy atmosphere. Unfortunately, numerous perfect opportunities for extended chase scenes are passed over. Instead, there’s a rapid string of characters going down to the basement exit and getting quickly killed. The movie should have been called “Don’t Go in the Basement If You’re Black.”
After a completely pointless, elongated, close-up tongue kissing scene, the final “twist” proves to be just as unpredictable, elaborate, and eye-rolling as the great reveals in all the Scream sequels.
Despite Holla If You Hear Me Kill You and Holla If I Kill You having no connection, in this film, the dude they refer to as a wigger (I don’t have to say the “W” word because I’m white) is killed by having a soda can shoved into his mouth. I’m seeing a pattern; the only white dudes in Holla movies are killed by having big phallic objects shoved down their throats.
And speaking of down-low parallels, the guys in this movie have a conversation about John Wayne Gacy! Holy gay serial killer paranoia in Holla horror movies! One of the dudes even has an offensive humor line in which he wonders if Gacy is where the term “gay” comes from. I can’t deny it. It made me laugh. Especially since Lorenzo Hunt, the actor who delivers the line, is really cute.
Lorenzo and the kill scenes make this one the winner of the two Holla If movies. But seriously, just watch Holla. It’s the ultimate Holla slasher.
