The Blackening

To watch this film you need to be obsessed with blackness, low IQ and completely stoned. I like black (by which I mean black american) comedies and romantic comedies, and accept that there is some stupid (often drug related) humour, amd that's part of the fun. They're fun films. This seemed to start well (ish) but degraded into some sterotype of black american culture, inferring that it's a trite, woke, superficial, and anti-intellectual culture. I guess cos the film revolves around a game where people get killed if they can't answer black culture questions, combined with a pretty weak plot and jokes that don't really work, as well as 2 dimensional people, it just overall comes over as a disappointing and boring film. If this film gets televised, I'm sure people would be looking forward to the adverts. Will anyone enjoy this? Few people I expect, just the drunk and/or stoned. Not recommended.. watch something like We Have A Ghost or there was another spooky black comedy which was pretty good last year too.

At first look at this poster I thought this was another straight to streaming hood comedy horror similar to the latter Wayans' output. After checking the upper mid reviews it seemed like a good choice. I was wrong. While this movie does have better than average for a black movie production standards, its simply too in your face with black American identity politics to be engaging. All of the black people in horror movie stereotypes have been handled already and all this movie does is repeat them and not in a very funny way. In terms of the dialogue and the discussions being had, its unlikely anyone other than black Americans will even know what they are talking about and this is why the jokes will fall flat. There is nothing wrong with making a black movie, but Spike Lee and Wayans movies are still accessible to a wider audience. Not to mention you will also have to subscribe to the politics of this movie to like it. As previously noted it had good production values and use of music, however its an identity politics movie and one issue is that it ends up with quite stereotypical characters which isn't exactly progressive. When a horror comedy is neither funny of scary to a wider audience its on its way to be a failure. I see a much lower IMDB rating coming soon...

Don't mind the 1-star and adjacent reviews-clearly these movie goers either cannot appreciate Black comedy or was expecting some Stephen King-type horror plot. You get what you get with this film: some recognizable stars, plenty of good laughs, enough suspense to keep you going. By all means, there are plenty of areas where the movie could've improved. While I don't think the horror elements need to be too clearly defined for a comedy, I would've appreciated more scary moments without the "cheese" (ie typical slasher film moments that felt cliché). I also think more character development wouldn't hurt. I loved the characters themselves but no one's arc was nearly developed enough. All this is to say--see the movie for what it is: a dare to turn the narrative of what it means to feature black characters in horror films. It's meant to be edgy with a whiff of political. And if you can't accept that, then this movie isn't for you.