Starting off Awful Advent, a movie about the “official” start of the Xmas season, Black Friday—and it’s a brand-new movie to boot!
The movie starts on Thanksgiving with an employee at a big box store setting up decorations for the next day’s sales as customers chaotically mill about outside. You can hear muffled shouting, see running silhouettes, and one person flings themselves at the frosted glass of the door while howling.
While he’s hanging a banner, a meteorite smashes through the roof. When he goes to investigate, he finds a pulsating tumorous pink blob with a proboscis which proceeds to spray white goo all over his face (phrasing). He screams as we cut away.
His managers walk the floor, complaining that he hasn’t completed hanging the decorations. They notice something strange, approach, and get attacked by the monster that he’s become.
You get the set-up: a meteorite carrying some alien biology crashes on Earth and starts turning people into monsters. The twist is that it’s happening at a big box store on Black Friday, immediately suggesting parallels between the kinds of customers who would go shopping over that holiday weekend and flesh-eating zombies. Nice enough setup for a horror comedy because it's impossible for it to take itself too seriously with that premise.
On top of all of this, the film features Bruce Campbell as both the store manager and as a producer suggesting we’re going to get some nice Evil Dead/Army of Darkness zombie antics. While the zombies do look decidedly like Deadites, the movie never quite rises to the occasion.
One issue is the film feels very lackadaisical. Not restrained, but like no one is quite giving 100%. To put it another way, it feels like we’re watching the dress rehearsal: everyone knows their part and is hitting their mark, but they’re saving their energy for the next take, the real one, the one that will count. A specific example of this is a scene where the clerks are running from the zombie horde. The zombies look like they’re not so much shambling after the heroes as they are traipsing and clearly making sure they don’t get too close during the shot.
Another issue that compounds that not-quite-100% problem is the film feels, physically, half-empty. The setting is a Toys ‘R’ Us/Best Buy type store, but the shelves are very far apart from each other and sparsely stocked. Because of that, the movie never feels claustrophobic like it should and the characters never feel hemmed in—something necessary for this kind of horror. Likewise, the store never feels crowded. Despite the sequence of all sorts of people coming through the front doors at midnight, we never see a packed store, never see staff trying to maneuver around customers, never even see a line at the registers.
The former we can chalk up to budget restrictions, the latter to COVD restrictions: doesn’t matter if you can afford a lot of extras to stuff into a confined space, you’re (rightly) not allowed to.
All of which is a real shame because it’s not a bad movie, it’s just not where it could be. The underlying metaphor of Black Friday shoppers as a violent threatening mass is both unsubtle and well-chosen. The best zombie movie metaphors tend to track with real-life situations. Plus, just narratively, a massive shopping crowd is going to be moving in strange and unexpected ways so a zombie outbreak could begin in one without the heroes knowing or noticing. You could wring out some real humor and horror with the audience seeing what’s happening while the characters remain ignorant.
Speaking of the characters, these are well-drawn, well-acted, and have some sincerely good moments. There’s a quiet portion where the characters reflect on working in retail. A line that really hit for me was, “Imagine making your living at the place you begged your mom and dad to take you to when you were younger.” The movie isn’t going for the glib, “retail sucks and it’s the customers’ fault” take. Instead, it speaks, just briefly, but enough, and precisely, about what is despairing about that kind of work and how inertia can take over.
Also, how management are a bunch of smarmy, abusive, sadistic pricks which leads us to Bruce Campbell as the store manager. I love Bruce Campbell in everything and he knows the role he’s playing here—smarmy, snarky, cowardly. This really is Ash promoted to upper management. Just as the rest of the movie, though, it’s a little dialed down.
Another instance of “more please” is Michael Jai White, of course. The only film that comes close to having enough Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite and even that’s debatable. He’s a fantastic actor, performer, and presence, and is asked to do nothing here. He doesn’t even get a good death. He just disappears between shots.
I feel like I’m being overly-critical of this movie. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have anything to say about it and here I am at nearly 1000 words. Nothing in this movie is bad, they don’t get anything wrong (even the things that feel wrong, like Executive Producer Devon Sawa having a relationship with the 20-year-younger female lead, are actually addressed and used to good effect), it’s just that everything they get right isn’t quite there. I liked everything this movie had, but it didn’t have enough of any of it.
In the end, it’s fine if you come across it on cable or a streaming service, all right to have on in the background at your solstice party, but not something to hunt down or to add to your annual holiday rotation.
3/5 Kaiju Karens Complaining About Coupons
Black Friday is available for purchase or rental from various online services
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