★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Casey Tebo.
As uber-auteur Stanley Kubrick once famously opined “Everything has already been done. Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.” Christmas horror has been done. Space alien zombies have been done. Christmas and zombies have been done. Have they been done together under the banner of the worst holiday there is? Maybe not.
Either way, Kubrick’s sentiment pretty well sums up Black Friday. It’s all been done before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not pretty fun romp around the shiny glow of the DVD player!
Black Friday jumps off with little or no warning for what’s coming — save for hordes of coupon-wielding lunatics hell-bent on clobbering their fellow God-fearing neighbor. An asteroid flies straight through the roof of a national toy store chain just as they’re setting up for the ultimate consumerism cabal — Black Friday.
But this isn’t just any plain old asteroid. It’s got a nasty virus affixed to it. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers with less weird ambiance and more monsters, zombies, and tentacles. The virus spreads quickly, but the sad-sack cast of retail workers, led by the great Bruce Campbell, are initially perplexed about which customer is just a run-of-the-mill a-hole vs. an infected space zombie.
What really pulls together Black Friday is the empathy and humor that’s brought to the downtrodden retail workers as they try to wrap their heads around the worst aspects of late-stage capitalism on the worst night of the year. But they’re faced with far more vexxing elements than cleaning up puke on isle five and being told that they are “complete and utterly incompetent boobs.”
Interestingly Bruce Campbell takes somewhat of a back seat to his normal scene-chomping approach to acting. With much aplomb, Campbell plays a mealy-mouthed manager who has little life of his own outside the store and is an obsequious lackey to the whims of the corporation.
The group is led by the sad-sack-iest leading man, Ken (Devon Sawa), who hits on clerks twice his junior, constantly sips from his flask, and dispenses advice no one wants or needs. In one of the first scenes in the film, Ken is dropping his daughters off with their mother, and his daughter loudly proclaims that Thanksgiving breakfast has got to be one of the saddest things ever.
Director Casey Tebo and writer Andy Greskoviak assemble the perfect if not somewhat clichéd group of misfits. The plucky young up-and-comer who has been stuck at the store for years, Marnie (Ivana Baquero). Brian (Stephen Peck), the toadie to Bruce Campbell’s ineffectual leader. And the germ-phobic rookie, Chris (Ryan Lee), who’d rather be pulling down $7 an hour than spending Thanksgiving with his crappy parents.
As the infection spreads throughout, the film wonderfully turns to a wild imagination of practical effects, masks, goop, and pink pulsating pods. Some of it looks ridiculous but that’s OK. It’s supposed to. Black Friday is a not-too-serious horror flick that unwinds as you’d expect it to, but again, that’s OK.
The important thing is that you got to spend time with family and friends watching ANOTHER Bruce Campbell horror film instead of getting into a fistfight over a five-pack of socks.
Black Friday is likely PG-13 and available everywhere, including the bargain bin at BestBuy.