Black Friday Review

Black Friday review.

Striving to be a light post-Thanksgiving dinner dessert, Black Friday mostly delivers. A fun cast makes up for some iffy late movie effects and an abrupt ending. It offers a predictable ride, but you won’t regret your time spent inside this toy store.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

Black Friday

Directed by Casey Tebo

Written by Andy Greskoviak

Starring Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Ryan Lee, Stephen Peck, Michael Jai White and Bruce Campbell

Black Friday Review

Black Friday celebrates the great American holiday of consumerism. It drops a good cast into a toy store on Thanksgiving night and unleashes a horde of…something. I’m not sure if they’re technically zombies or mutants or undead or possessed people. But they’re something.

Unbeknownst to the employees of We Love Toys, they’re in for even more hell than they bargained for this Black Friday. Customers are bad enough. Customers possessed by a parasitic entity are even worse. Between corporate pressure to remain open and trying to survive the night, it’s shaping up to be the worst Black Friday yet.

Black Friday knows what kind of movie it is. It casts fun actors in a B-movie plot and asks you to have fun. It falls into trouble when it tries to be anything bigger than that. The movie’s climax is hurt by special effects they can’t pull off on their budget. There’s a 50s movie charm to characters reacting to something you can’t see for long periods…but it makes the movie feel cheaper than it is. Then we see the big effect…and we were probably better off watching them look at nothing.

Our hero is Ken (Devon Sawa) who desperately wants to get back to survive the night and see his kids again. He has a romantic interest in Marnie (Ivana Baquero) and a buddy in Chris (Ryan Lee). The try hard manager Brian (Stephen Peck) and store owner Jonathan (Bruce Campbell) are the earthly obstacles our crew must deal with before the world goes to hell.

Campbell plays against his famous, cool monster hunting type as the lying boss. Michael Jai White shows up too briefly as a bad ass employee. A great cast who understands what the movie needs from them gets you a long way. It’s all played for fun. There are, of course, some brutal and permanent endings for many of the characters. There isn’t a bad performance in the bunch and all the characters have their unique quirks and takes on the world.

Black Friday is the kind of comfort movie where you already know everything that is going to happen before you push play. You’re just hoping for enough laughs and smiles to make it 84 minutes well spent. You’ll get that here. These are likable characters with decent dialogue and some funny moments. “Customers are zombies” has been done better. Kills have been done better and more surprisingly. Black Friday knows it’s all been done before too. It focuses on its characters and their relationships to make it a fun watch.

There’s always a layer of fun to watching characters who have no aptitude for surviving an apocalypse thrown into one. Black Friday leans into this idea for most of its run time. We get the requisite falling out between characters. Heroic sacrifice and comedic twists and turns are there as expected. Like I said, you already know what you’re in for.

If you go in expecting a light, humorous time with a group of fun characters…you’ll get what you want out of Black Friday. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Sawa is a good leading man. He’s certainly earned his genre cred by now. There’s a decent examination of his character in the middle of the mayhem. He sees himself differently than everyone else sees him. It doesn’t add up to much but it’s an interesting enough dissection that you don’t usually see about the main hero in a B-movie.

There’s also the expected takedown of retail work and customers. No knew ground is broken on the latter but the former had some specific personal anecdotes that worked well. Campbell’s character has an odd turn partway through the movie that isn’t build up well enough to be effective…but even his passion for retail has its limits.

Not every joke lands in Black Friday, but the overall hit rate combine with a loose tone to create an easy watch. There’s some good one liners and comebacks but most of the humor comes from the movie understanding the absurdity of the situation and turning the dial up to 11. Characters do stupid things because the movie calls for a stupid thing to be done in the name of a joke.

The truth is that a better ending wouldn’t really make Black Friday a better movie anyway. The ending doesn’t matter. You know who is going to survive when the movie starts. There is an enjoyable enough ride to the finish. It’s a movie made by fans of B-movies for fans of B-movies.

Scare Value

Black Friday falters when it tries to be a bigger movie than it can pull off. Thankfully, most of the run time is spent with the group of workers in more intimate settings. It has some anger to direct towards retail work which mostly lands. Management and customers both get taken down. There are no scares to be had, but winning performances make Black Friday a fine use of your holiday time.

3/5