Black Friday – Film Review

On Thanksgiving night, a group of disgruntled toy store employees begrudgingly arrive for work to open the store at midnight for the busiest shopping day of the year. Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor. This group of misfits led by store manager Jonathan (Bruce Campbell) and longtime employee Ken (Devon Sawa) soon find themselves battling against hordes of holiday shoppers who have been turned into monstrous creatures hellbent on a murderous rampage on Black Friday.

We all know that every Black Friday – no matter what’s going on, COVID or not – it’s going to be absolutely crazy busy in virtually every store that’s having deals on. Sometimes this means hundreds of people parading in the store, searching for some goods whereas in other, more tragic instances, people will actually end up getting killed because of Black Friday. Long story short – it’s hectic.

But nobody really ever talks about what the employees of these stores must be dealing with. They’re the ones who will be at the store for eight hours having to check out thousands of customers that day, and it’s undoubtedly going to take a toll on them. This is essentially the setup for Casey Tebo‘s Black Friday – a horror-comedy slasher. We follow a big toy store as they gear up for Black Friday once again, but this time, it just so happens that a zombie outbreak is upon the world and their already hectic Black Friday gets a whole lot worse.

I’ll just say this right off the bat – Black Friday certainly has its moments of fun where the audience can sit back and have a good chuckle or two. But at the same time, this is a film that tries painfully hard to be relatable and funny to the point where it can oftentimes be cringe-worthy instead of hilarious. There are so many moments in this film that I wish the screenwriters would’ve just let flow naturally instead of writing these strange jokes into them that feel so forced and sometimes annoying.

A lot of this movie’s humor comes from seeing all of these employees getting flustered because it’s Black Friday. There really isn’t a story here. I get it – all this movie is trying to be is a fun and amusing slasher film that has a bunch of zombie shoppers trying to kill employees on one of the most hectic days of the year leading up to Christmas. It has some funny scenes every once in a while and some of the kills are impressive, but there should still be some sort of substance here. This movie has literally zero.

You could legitimately describe this entire movie’s “plot” in about two or three paragraphs and that’s not a good thing. There have been many horror slashers that have been able to be amusing while also being able to tell a great story – take Scream for instance. But Scream this is not. It’s an admirable effort, but it ultimately doesn’t find much to do or so besides “Black Friday sucks, right? Let’s have a bit of fun with it by injecting some zombie killers in a store! That’s all we have!”.

But you can tell that a lot of the actors involved with this project did have a lot of fun making it and that’s always great to see. Most notably though, it’s the legendary Bruce Campbell. He’s obviously no stranger to horror movies and while his performance here isn’t in his list of bests, it is still a ton of fun to see Campbell back in the horror genre having the time of his life in this movie.

Perhaps if you want to watch a tongue-in-cheek movie about Black Friday that also scratches the horror itch, throw this on and give it a shot. But just be warned – if you’re seeking even a sliver of substance, stay away from this because you’ll be disappointed.