Like a zombie virus slowly spreading across the globe, Black Friday has become an ever-present phenomenon in our shopping calendar. So now is the perfect time for a horror film to be set on the backdrop of this day, which bodes well for Casey Tebo’s entry in the zombie genre. Set in a toy store on Thanksgiving, we follow a group of employees as they deal with an increasingly hostile group of shoppers (who it turns out are infected by a parasite that distorts them into monsters).
A relatively lightweight affair, some grand effects manage to hide the low-budget nature of the piece. You would think a single location and hints of the likes of The Mist and The Thing would mean there would be a palpable tension to Black Friday. But this is something that feels lacking here. Maybe it’s an irrelevant, humorous tone or the fact that proceedings have a tendency to stop-and-start, but as an outright horror, this film fails to land on a tone or atmosphere to leave an impression.
The film also suffers from too many characters, with little time given to develop them beyond their more two-dimensional caricatures. It’s always fun to see Bruce Campbell in a new genre piece and occasionally that beloved charisma cracks through, but this is not a top-tier work from the beloved genre figure. Many of you will come for Campbell (I certainly did) but Black Friday is far from groovy in this regard. And the rest of the cast are fine, if in need of material that elevates them beyond straight-to-streaming fare.
But there is a low-key charm to Black Friday, an admirable gloppy-ness to the monsters (things even get a bit Lovecraftian by the end) and a roster of jokes that occasionally land. It’s disposable fun, one that leaves little impression and is happy to not elevate the genre beyond where it has been since the mid-80s.
A relatively lightweight affair, some grand effects manage to hide the low-budget nature of the piece. You would think a single location and hints of the likes of The Mist and The Thing would mean there would be a palpable tension to Black Friday. But this is something that feels lacking here. Maybe it’s an irrelevant, humorous tone or the fact that proceedings have a tendency to stop-and-start, but as an outright horror, this film fails to land on a tone or atmosphere to leave an impression.
The film also suffers from too many characters, with little time given to develop them beyond their more two-dimensional caricatures. It’s always fun to see Bruce Campbell in a new genre piece and occasionally that beloved charisma cracks through, but this is not a top-tier work from the beloved genre figure. Many of you will come for Campbell (I certainly did) but Black Friday is far from groovy in this regard. And the rest of the cast are fine, if in need of material that elevates them beyond straight-to-streaming fare.
But there is a low-key charm to Black Friday, an admirable gloppy-ness to the monsters (things even get a bit Lovecraftian by the end) and a roster of jokes that occasionally land. It’s disposable fun, one that leaves little impression and is happy to not elevate the genre beyond where it has been since the mid-80s.