Doing The Bright Thing

By RICHARD CORLISS

Kid is an Andy Hardy for the '90s: a scheming innocent, ever wavering between girlfriends, ever scampering away from trouble and smack into worse. With his impish, Darryl Strawberry-size grin and an 8-in.-high flattop haircut that looks like a pillbox hat out of Zsa Zsa's closet, Kid (Christopher Reid) swipes audience sympathy from the get-go. Now he sits in the principal's office after a cafeteria fight with evil dude Stab (Paul Anthony). Seems Stab has branded Kid's dead mother a whore. The white principal is befuddled. "Why in God's name," she asks the perp, "did you call his mother a garden tool?" Ho', that is. Ho-ho-ho.

The elements of House Party are familiar from a zillion youth movies: the boy who sneaks out to a teen hop, the school punks who spit out threats, the nice girl our hero flirts with and the even nicer one he winds up with. Lots of wit in the pop-tune lyrics; too much raw-mouthed slurring of women and homosexuals in the dialogue. The difference here is that the filmmakers and the lead actors (including rap artists Kid 'N Play and Full Force) are all middle-class blacks. The script virtually carries warning labels for unwary teens. Drinking is bad; sex without a condom is irresponsible. Rude and righteous, House Party is John Hughes divided by Spike Lee. "I wanted to make a movie that I had not seen," says writer-director Reginald Hudlin, 28, "but a movie that I wanted to see."

Made for just $2.5 million, House Party has won positive reviews and healthy box office, earning more money per screen than the megahit The Hunt for Red October. Most important to Hudlin and his older brother Warrington, who produced it, House Party appeals to the people it is about. "There's a theater two blocks from our house in Harlem," Reginald says, "and kids come out narrating the plot to their friends and get back in line. It's nice to provide an experience that you wanted when you were that age."

The Hudlin bros hail from East St. Louis, Ill., where they were nurtured, says Reginald, "in a matrix of black folk culture. Brother Joe May, a famous gospel singer, lived two doors down on one side, and Ike and Tina Turner lived two doors down the other side. It was sort of heaven and hell, equidistant." + The Hudlins emigrated to two matrices of official culture -- Warrington went to Yale, Reginald to Harvard -- but as filmmakers they wanted to return home. "When we went to parties, this funny stuff would happen," Reginald says. "I promised my friends that one day I would put it all in a film. So I made a 20-minute version of House Party as my senior thesis."

The filmmakers pepper House Party with a wide range of cultural references, from Public Enemy (the rap group) to Public Enemy (the Cagney classic). But most of their humor is homeboy, or what Reginald calls "Afro-Americana. Little bits of junk culture that tie the black community together." That's what the Hudlins hope to do now that, as Warrington puts it, "every studio in Hollywood has said they'd finance our next movie." As a kid, Warrington thought "movies were like magic that was performed in Hollywood." Now he and his brother have learned that if you believe in magic, you can start making it.

With reporting by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York