MOVIE REVIEW : Amusing Asides in ‘House Party’

Hair of the dog that bit hip-hop fans? Nope. “House Party 3” (citywide) is as much hangover as holdover, a relatively spiritless sequel that puts the law of diminishing returns to the groggy proof again. The great fun that was the first one is as forgotten as a blackout by now.

Kid ‘N Play (Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin) are back and now living in L.A., apparently retired from their own rap careers and running a management company so fledgling they resort to slight scams for cash flow. A minor one they pull on a seedy music-business bigwig, Showboat (Michael Colyar)--who seems to have been lifted wholesale from a “Superfly” flick--again gives the pair the prompting they need to spend much of the movie on the run from potential castraters.

Aside from hulk-avoidance and creditor-dodging, the other half of any “House Party” movie is the romantic entanglements of Kid, the charmer whose high-rise hair is in elevator dreads now. This time he’s engaged, not to saucy Sydney (Tisha Campbell, making a brief, tempting return), but to the sweetest of sweethearts, Veda (Angela Means).

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The well-intentioned Kid is, of course, utterly beset by females in heat now that he’s wearing an engagement ring--and suffers the inevitable nightmare in which he’s married by a winking preacher with cleavage deeper than the Grand Canyon--while both he and his intended are surrounded by naysaying friends and family. Call it “Posse of the Bride.”

Kid ‘N Play are still OK, but their squabbling seems pretty half-hearted this time around. The picture is periodically resuscitated by some of its supporting players--especially the very funny Bernie Mac as Uncle Vester, who more or less stands in here for the first film’s Robin Harris as the lovably loud-mouthed authority figure, and who intermittently shouts the movie out of its slumber. The rap trio TLC, as the hot female act the heroes pretend to represent, also brightens up the affair in two fleeting scenes.

Most of the performers, professional thesps and cameo rappers alike, come through with charisma enough that it’s not the most disagreeable hour and a half out, though you keep wishing they’d been given some business to do. (The best bits play like asides, not set pieces.) Scripter Takashi Bufford and director Eric Meza--making a feature debut after a run of music videos--aren’t much help, resorting with alarming regularity to stereotypes that well pre-date hip-hop, from the ageist (look out for that senile aunt who digs porno movies) to the mildly blaxploitative.

The producers don’t seem to have much faith in their own waning franchise, begun so promisingly by the long-gone Hudlin brothers four scant years ago. Shot by Anghel Decca, “HP3” looks a lot shoddier than both its predecessors, overstocked with under-lit extreme close-ups that suggest all involved expected a payoff on VHS rentals. “Home Video Party,” indeed.

‘House Party 3’

Christopher Reid: Kid

Christopher Martin: Play

Angela Means: Veda

Bernie Mac: Uncle Vester

David Edwards: Stinky

A New Line production. Director Eric Meza. Producer Carl Craig. Executive producers Doug McHenry, George Jackson, Janet Grillo. Screenplay by Takashi Bufford. Cinematographer Anghel Decca. Editor Tom Walls. Music David Allen Jones. Music supervisor Dawn Soler. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA rating: R, for language and sexual situations. Times guidelines: Rough language, salacious talk, brief nudity in a porno movie seen on a TV, leering at erotic dancers.