Film Review: BLACK FRIDAY! (2021)

 BLACK FRIDAY! (2021) USA 1hr 24mins

Director: Casey Tebo

"This is the biggest night of the year!" - Jonathan Wexler

"What was wrong with that lady?? Am I going to be okay????" - Emmett

"I got your discount right here." - Ken Bates

Employees of the We Love Toys store are all gearing up for their big Black Friday event. Foregoing family thanksgiving meals to work this sale hoping for the big bonuses they were promised. Staff hit the stores early but hungry shoppers have been camping out since before they arrive. A freak meteor shower rains down on the store and strange fleshy, pink blobs make their way on to the shops shelves. The first casualties are shop employees who are attacked and infected via a floppy proboscis type thing that turns them into flesh craving zombies. The infection soon spreads to the shoppers, who after being hell bent on turning others start to work together to build something bigger than anything humanity has ever seen before. Leaving only a small group of employees left to fight for survival.

The characters are written in a fairly standard form and if I'm honest are fairly interchangeable but still quite funny and likeable. A welcome return to a lead role is Devon Sawa as Ken Bates, a divorced dad with two daughters who has spent the last 10 years at the store and become that slightly arrogant joker who thinks he's kind of cool. Ivana Baquero is Marnie the attractive, cool yet edgy love interest for Ken. Ryan Lee as Chris the young lad who is wondering about his life choices. Stephen Peck is Brian the stuck up supervisor who loves to pick on everyone. This covers the main cast but we also have the older lady waiting for retirement Ruth (Ellen Coulton), the stuffy long standing employee of the month Anita (Celeste Olivia) and the over enthusiastic new starter Emmett (Louie Kurtzman). To top off the team we have a couple of familiar names; Michael Jai White is Archie, the rough and ready hero type and the piece de resistance is, of course, the wonderful Bruce Campbell appearing as We Love Toys store manager Jonathan Wexler. Bruce obviously brings the charm and the one liners, I enjoyed his character the most of all of them but sometimes even he seemed a little disjointed. Wexler is a bit of a cowardly bastard and Bruce pulls cowardly off well with his usual style and finesse but it's hard to see him as a bastard, this might just be me though. I found the acting from all perfectly adequate given the script they were working from which was at times a little pedestrian. The character dynamics as a whole have had a fair bit of thought put into them and every character has their moment but the plot lays things on a bit too heavy sometimes and the script is possibly a bit too serious for the comedic alien/zombie carnage occuring all around them.  

The zombies are more extra terrestrial than anything else but I am still calling them zombies. The infected turn and act the same way as zombies, the parasite is transferred by a bite and the infected reanimate and cannibalise their victims as zombies do. They look really awesome! I love the use of practical effects and prosthetics, it is a brilliant tribute to some classic 80's horror. Lots of cloudy eyed, boil encrusted ghouls oozing with blood and pus is loads of fun to watch and there is more to come. As the movie progresses the ghouls start to change. They look and act as a zombie would at first, then start to act a bit odd and begin moving furniture and objects about to form a kind of nest type thing, then they begin to morph into creatures not too far from the vampires in FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (1996). In fact one of the main zombies bears an uncanny resemblance to Henrietta from EVIL DEAD II (1987) before she goes full blown monster. Neither of these ideas are bad at all, they work pretty well and look so good. With out completely spoiling the finale the "end level boss" so to speak is again nothing new exactly but really quite fun. There is gore present in this but it's not as plentiful as I would have hoped. It is fun and squishy but not quite as frequent or as graphic as say THE BEYOND (1986), NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986) or the aforementioned EVIL DEAD movies which BLACK FRIDAY! is trying very hard to imitate.

The soundtrack is modern, bold, lively and very effective. BLACK FRIDAY! certainly has a few faults but nothing that would not make me want to watch it a few more times. It's mostly really fun despite a few slow moments, it brings nothing new along to the genre but it's visually pleaseing and a great tribute to monster movies of the 80's. Having Bruce in this scores it a brain on it's own as the man will always be an absolute legend so on the whole I give BLACK FRIDAY! 3 brains out of 5.

BLACK FRIDAY! is available to watch on Amazon Prime and to buy on DVD and Blu Ray.