Tuesday night, I dragged my poor lover off to the cinema once more to watch the Unlimited Screening of The Blackening. We've both had a bit of a hankering for horror movies recently so I thought as a horror-comedy this might be appealing.
First of all, what the actual fuck was this film?
Don't get me wrong, I liked it. It was an entertaining 90 minutes or so. But it was a predictable jumble of horror movie stereotypes trying to be ironic and poke fun at themselves while simultaneously making a very big point about the treatment of Ethnic groups in the movie industry. This film gave me Scary Movie vibes but just not as successfully.
I'm going to try and keep this spoiler free as the movie isn't officially out yet, but I knew who the murderer/guy behind this was the moment he was introduced in the movie. It was concreted the moment they were selected as 'the Blackest' member of the group, it was sooooo obvious.
So long story short, The Blackening is about a man who has a grudge and decides to use his love of games to murder the people he blames for ruining his life. A bit like Saw, but more mundane. He sets up this elaborate and yet very racist board game, the rules are simple, get an answer wrong and you die, refuse to play and you die. Basically they were going to die.
The plot here had promise, sure it was a bit weird, but there was some originality in there somewhere even if it was a million horror tropes mashed into one to take the piss. There was a lot of blood, a fair bit of violence, and a tons of inappropriate language. So as far as horror-comedy goes it had premise. There just didn't seem to be much point, kill count here was technically only 4 and 2 of those weren't in the victim category. Don't get me wrong I love a movie where the hunted turns the tables and there is sort of a happy ending, but we could have had a bit more threat here for the comic relief of all the characters to really hit home and be funny. Instead it seemed like overkill.
We got caught by a gentleman who frequents the cinema as much as we do, and we got chatting. He expressed how disappointed he was with this movie as he was hoping for more deaths. I can see where he is coming from, but I don't agree. I liked the fact we came out on top of this movie with our gang mostly intact, but I did want to see more action. Everyone was far too chill, it needed an injection of realism to really bump it up a notch, it was a bit too silly otherwise.
In terms of the actual hardcore point of the movie, IE that the Black members of the cast are always killed in a horror movie first (if involved at all), I agree it's bullshit. Skin colour shouldnt be a selling point of anything let alone a movie, and if you need to make your cast primarily white in order to market to a demographic then you deserve for your movie to bomb. I liked the sarcastic and yet meaningful tagline of this movie 'We can't all die first', this was a genius bit of marketing and certainly drew attention to the point.
The ending of the movie set us up for a sequel for sure. Maniacal laughter from the bottom of a well is never a good sign and a sure fire way to indicate that this sitch isnt over. I'd be interested to see a sequel actually, despite not enjoying this movie as much as I had hoped I would. Hopefully if there were to be one they'd kick it up a notch. Drop the humour a little and branch out into some different movie tropes and we might be onto a winner.
Overall then, I think I'm going to award The Blackening a 6/10. Twas alright, I probably wouldn't watch it again because it was pretty wild but in a forgettable way, but perhaps I'd consider it as background noise?
Have you seen this movie? Do you intend to? Leave a comment on my socials!
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