Movie Review

The Blackening takes on horror movie clichés and racism in one fell swoop

Horror movie parodies typically play pretty well because as much fans love to be scared by horrors, they also love to laugh at the genre’s clichés and stereotypes. The Scream franchise has been successful straddling the line between actual horror and parody, and the Wayans Brothers made almost $900 million collectively with the five movies in the Scary Movie franchise.

The Blackening takes things one step further, making the often-implicit racism in horror movies explicit. A group of Black friends – Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins), Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Allison (Grace Byers), Shanika (X Mayo), King (Melvin Gregg), and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) – have gathered at a remote cabin as a kind of school reunion/Juneteenth celebration.

The friends soon discover a game room, where a board game called “The Blackening” is displayed prominently. Not knowing that two of their friends – Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharoah) – had arrived previously and found the game, the group unwittingly starts to play, and quickly discover that the game is designed just for them, with questions designed to test their “Blackness” and penalties ranging from torture to death for anyone who gets them wrong.

Directed by Tim Story and written by Perkins and Tracy Oliver, the film trades on the long history of institutional racism, which is a fully accepted concept in the world of the film. The characters hardly blink when they’re confronted with racist imagery or by white people in authoritative positions. It’s all part and parcel of their day-to-day reality, and while still distressing to a degree, they don’t get too upset by it.

What is upsetting is the anonymous killer trying to knock them off one by one. The film leads with comedy – its tagline is the knowing “We Can’t All Die First” – although it aims to be smarter than the notoriously stupid Scary Movie films. The game’s questions range from light (“Name five black actors who were in Friends”) to more serious, but all involve the threat of death. People do get hurt in the various attack scenes, but they’re staged in almost a slapstick manner, a combination of tones that works more often than not.

After a promising beginning, however, the film gets bogged down in the second half. The filmmakers throw out a lot of clever ideas in the first act, but they seem to run out of steam as the story goes along. They never really commit to making the villain scary, so even though terror is not the first priority, that lack undercuts the story to a degree. The film does subvert one big horror movie trope toward the end, but in so doing, it limps toward an unsatisfactory conclusion instead of going out on a high.

The cast is comprised mostly of up-and-coming, lesser-known actors, and they play off each other extremely well. Most notable among the group are Perkins, who wrote himself a nice, plum part that he nevertheless kills; Byers, who gets a lot of funny lines that play on her comparatively light skin; and Walls, whose character always seems to be at the center of the action.

While The Blackening isn’t as successful as it could have been, it has way more positives than negatives going for it. A horror parody with an edge to it, it serves as both a sending-up of the genre and a reckoning for the long history of discrimination Black people have faced in such films.

---

The Blackening is now playing in theaters.

Photo by Glen Wilson

Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharoah in The Blackening.

movies film

Movie Review

New horror movie Faces of Death puts a modern twist on cult classic

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy — in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks — is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

---

Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

movies film