Review: Black Friday (2021)

Black Friday (2021)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Black Friday is a goofy little zombie horror-comedy that I imagine anyone who's ever worked in retail will get a kick out of. Its stabs at greater depth and satire of how retail work chews people up and spits them out only partially land thanks to inconsistent characterization, and the low budget was sometimes obvious in the action sequences, but it's saved by a great cast, some funny jokes, and outstanding, icky creature effects that easily served as the highlights, all tied together by a premise that I'm surprised hasn't been done before. Watching it courtesy of Popcorn Frights in a double bill with Evil Dead 2, I can comfortably say that this is no Evil Dead 2, but it's still an entertaining thrill ride.

The premise writes itself: what if the swarms of violent, aggressive, zombie-like shoppers who besiege stores on Black Friday were actual zombies? Specifically, on Thanksgiving night, a meteor shower rains down weird globs of goo in suburban America (the cars' license plates say Massachusetts, so let's go with that), one of which goes through the roof of an All-Mart and infects the staff who are getting ready for tomorrow's Black Friday doorbusters. Next door in the shopping plaza, the staff at the big-box toy store We Love Toys are going through hell on the busiest shopping day of the year, even before some of them start vomiting up their guts in the middle of the store or dropping a Buick-sized turd in the bathroom, and naturally, once the shoppers start biting people, all hell breaks loose.

It's obvious watching this that the filmmakers did not have a lot of money to spend, and there are times when it visibly constrains their ambitions. The "massive hordes" of shoppers feel strangely small and sedate, like they used editing tricks to get around the fact that they could only afford a couple dozen extras and didn't fully succeed at covering it up. (That, or this was filmed during the pandemic and large crowd shots were off-limits; either way, it has the same effect.) The opening of Krampus this wasn't, and in a movie about how much it sucks to work in retail in which asshole shoppers are a big part of the plot, this felt like an oversight. That being said, the places where they did spend the money were just as visible, and paid off handsomely. The KNB effects team did the zombies, and they were some of the most grotesque I've ever seen in a movie, the infection starting off with a massive rash and boils covering the skin and slowly progressing to have the infected turn increasingly animalistic and barely recognizable as formerly human. These were some ugly and horrifying monsters, especially for such a lighthearted film, and it made great use of them, most notably with the obnoxious grandmother who went from a walking Karen stereotype to something that looks almost like a hairless werewolf -- but still recognizable by her gaudy earrings and "#1 Grandma" necklace. Without spoiling anything, the effects got truly extravagant towards the end of the film, going from a zombie movie to something way bigger, and throughout, the quality of the practical effects work was top-notch.

On the character front, the writing for them was this film's Achilles' heel, as all of them felt like stock archetypes who had additional character traits layered on seemingly at random. Ken, a long-suffering employee who is also the divorced middle-aged father to two daughters, was probably the most consistently written of the bunch and thus my personal favorite, a deeply flawed man who on one hand genuinely cares about his family and wishes to provide for them, but at the same time is held back by his own personal failings, from his arrogance to his hitting on much younger women. The rest of the characters were not so lucky, including as they did (beyond just the cannon fodder) the fairly flat younger employees Chris and Marnie, the obnoxious bootlicking hate sink Brian, and most unfortunately, the manager Jonathan. There seemed to be two competing characterizations for Jonathan, an evil jackass who takes pride in flaunting his authority over his employees and somebody who's been slowly going mad for years over the stress the job puts on him, and while these could've been meshed together, the manner in which the film switches between them felt like it didn't know what mode to settle on. As a result, I didn't really buy Jonathan either as an ordinary villain or a tragic one.

It was a shame, because the cast were giving it their all. Devon Sawa was the MVP as Ken, but everybody involved injected life into otherwise lifeless characters, whether it was Ryan Lee and Ivana Baquero as Chris and Marnie, making them both an interesting couple and two people who you'd hate to see spending the rest of their lives working in a toy store, or Bruce Campbell as Jonathan, going outside his normal Ash Williams archetype to play a fairly dorky control freak whose only real power is his seniority with We Love Toys. Where the writing failed them, the actors managed to redeem the characters here, giving them many more layers than the screenplay did. You get the sense that these are people who hate their jobs and have come to resent each other on top of it, all of them deciding to say "screw you" to the company that's been screwing them over for so long. They all did wonders livening up the film, making for a great team of comic zombie survivors who I enjoyed watching from start to finish.

The Bottom Line

It's very lightweight and doesn't cut very deep, but Black Friday is still a fun zom-com with an outstanding cast and special effects that make up for its shortcomings. It did a good job getting me in the mood for the month after the spooky season.