Black Friday (2021)

It is hard to dismiss the horror-comedy Black Friday for ambition, however on the level of execution you admit to yourself that it never quite makes it to the winner’s circle.  That’s too bad because a Christmas zombie picture featuring horror icons Devon Sawa and Bruce Campbell could and should be a lot better.

It goes down like this: It is Thanksgiving night and the eve of Black Friday is about to descend.  An alcoholic dad named Ken (Sawa) and his hypochondriac buddy Chris (Ryan Lee) join forces with a group of disgruntled toy store employees to batten down the hatches for the holiday hell-fest.  Meanwhile an alien parasite crashes – oh GOOD!  Reality! –  and turns the hundreds of holiday shoppers into flesh-eating zombies.

What follows sounds like it might fit comfortably in the nest of other absurdist zombie comedies like Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland, but sadly it never really rises that high.  The comedy is there, the violence is there, the zombies are there but you can’t set aside the fact that the metaphor of holiday shopping and zombie apocalypse is just too on-the-nose and badly executed.  That’s especially true when it tries to build the characters in the middle of the mayhem.  The point is made early on but then it can quite find its footing.  Black Friday is the kind of movie that you can imagine might be enjoyed by a group of people in someone’s living room slightly tanked and ready for some B-movie fun.  For this lonely critic, it never really went anywhere.