There’s almost certainly a decent horror-comedy to be made around the bizarre modern retail concept known as ’Black Friday,’ the post-Thanksgiving madness (that has now spread across the Atlantic and seems to last most of December) that compels normally-sane consumers to work themselves into a frenzy at the thought of missing out on saving five quid on some piece of cheap plastic tat for Christmas. Sadly Black Friday, despite its best intentions, isn’t that film.
A meteor of unknown origin crashes through the roof of a big retail department store as it prepares to open for its Black Friday evening shift. A parasitic organism emerges and turns those it infects into rampaging blood-crazed killers. Nasty. Meanwhile, reluctant workers at a We Love Toys outlet (do such places even still exists these days?) are similarly gearing up for the hell of Black Friday; in their number are Ken Bates (Devon Sawa), estranged from his wife and looking after his two young daughters, geeky Chris (Ryan Lee) and a slew of other cannon fodder stereotypes (including genre legend Bruce Campbell as store manager Jonathan Wexler). Shoppers pour into the store (although in truth it seems that the budget couldn’t run to that many of them) but the parasitic mutation is spreading and the shoppers soon become even uglier and more violent than usual. Ken and the survivors of the first attack are forced into hiding before trying to find a way out of the beleaguered store even as something nasty is growing in Santa’s Village.
Black Friday’s not especially big or clever; its targets are easy and obvious we’ve been here before – George Romero was pointing out the similarity between mindless shopping frenzy and zombies decades ago – and the film commits the cardinal sins of so many would-be comedy horrors – it’s not funny enough and it’s not scary enough. The humour is limp and predictable, the gore is either tame or derivative. One sequence in which the characters, trapped in a storeroom, attempt to explain how their lives led them to the retail sector, at least attempts to put flesh on the bones of wafer-thin characters and the climax is pleasantly, if rather stupidly, ambitious and in the best traditions of would-be apocalyptic cinema, is ambiguous and open-ended. But ultimately Black Friday is a bit of a disappointment, despite Bruce Campbell doing his best to inject some life into the proceedings and delivering the best performance here, as it wastes a promising premise because it doesn’t seem to know what to do with it or how to properly exploit it. In the best traditions of the shopping experience, you might well be tempted to take Black Friday back and ask for a refund…
Signature Entertainment presents Black Friday on Digital Platforms February 14th
