I had a feeling that horror comedy Black Friday probably wouldn't turn out to be much good. However, my love for horror icon Bruce Campbell (My Name is Bruce, The Evil Dead) meant I just had to check him out in this. Directed by Casey Tebo, and written by Andy Greskoviak, this trod familiar ground, making for an all too familiar film, albeit, one that features some great make-up effects for the creatures.
It is Black Friday and the staff of a children's toy store are preparing for the influx of desperate shoppers. These include among them germophobe Chris (Ryan Lee - Goosebumps, Super 8), divorced father Ken (Devon Sawa - Final Destinaton), b*tchy shift manager Brian (Stephen Peck), and store manager Jonathan (Campbell). A meteorite shower over the town brings with it alien parasites, which soon start to infect anyone they see. Soon, it isn't the shoppers the staff have to deal with, but zombie-like infected determined to pass on their affliction.
To its credit there are some things that Black Friday does do right. The action is swift to start, rather than take time to introduce the protagonists, they each get little scenes setting up their character type, but the horror soon begins far quicker than expected. Over the course of the movie the infected mutate into more alien looking creatures. I thought the make-up for all stages of this transformation looked fantastic. Initially starting off with large boils on the skin, the infected later develop, changing from a zombie look to one more monstrous. It does go too far however, the whole finale takes place against a large static foe, that was at least partly CG. Due to this final creature not even moving from the spot it was standing on, it created a surprisingly dull way to end things.
There are plenty of scenes of action leading up to this, and being a comedy horror, sometimes the weapons used to battle the invaders are not the most sensible, silly string and a skateboard being two such examples. The actual monster attacks didn't look the best at times, a really artificial rope type substance is vomited out of the monsters to reel in victims, but it looked unnatural and took away from the scenes of potential horror.
This was another film full of unlikable characters, no one here stuck out as fun to watch, most the characters were the opposite, very annoying. Worst of these was Ken, a character who was always attempting to be painfully cool even when he was on his own. Battling a monster while spitting out constant terrible one-liners did not make for engaging scenes. Campbell, being the draw for me, was a character that I liked, if only because it was him. I had expected him to have a 'blink and you miss it' role, but he is actually in the movie for a decent amount of screen time. He gets some fun moments, with his role mainly dialogue based rather than action.
Horror comedies are hard to get right, with this one, I can't say I found a single part of this funny. The moments of humour left me feeling cold, which may have to do with how generic this all felt. There were no real surprises to be found, and I found myself really not caring what happened to any of the characters, which was a shame.
Horror comedies are hard to get right, with this one, I can't say I found a single part of this funny. The moments of humour left me feeling cold, which may have to do with how generic this all felt. There were no real surprises to be found, and I found myself really not caring what happened to any of the characters, which was a shame.
Outside of some pretty poor looking CG effects, Black Friday did often look good on camera. The humour was a miss for me, the characters annoying, and the story bland and unimaginative, but at least it had some great make-up and creature design. Black Friday can currently be streamed on Shudder, and is the first Christmas themed horror I have seen this season.
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