Review: The Blackening

The Blackening
Cert: 15 / 97 mins / Dir. Tim Story / Trailer

In Tim Story's*¹ satirical horror/comedy mashup, eight black American friends arrange a Juneteenth party in a remote AirBnB in the rural backwoods, doubling as a ten-year reunion get-together. Their jollity is interrupted as they learn a killer is targeting the house and forcing them to play the most inappropriate game...

After the ads, trailers and BBFC card, an ominous fade-in red-on-black caption reads "The following is based on true events...", a preposition joined a few seconds later by the words "...that never happened". That's the level we're at, here. That's the film setting out its stall. That's how this opens.

So. The Blackening only has one real joke: that the token black character in a slasher movie always dies first*², so what happens when the slasher movie is filled with those? That joke, incidentally, is written out on the poster in a point-size larger than the fim's title, so you already know it before the lights go down. You can imagine how this drags out across 97 minutes. After a scene-setting pretitle sequence involving a couple of casualties, the friends arrive at the customary cabin in the woods and the plot thickens. To the point of stagnation. The key thing in slasher movies is that the players are picked of one-by-one, ebbing the protagonists' ability to fight back, narrowing the identity of the killer, raising the tension and giving the whole thing a pyramidal structure. Without going into too many spoilers, not here. So the whole thing drags its heels while nothing actually happens. Oh, except for a third-act reveal which may be one of the most repeatedly telegraphed progressions in cinematic history.

The core problem is that Story's movie isn't thoughtful enough to be a satire, gruesome enough to be a horror or funny enough for a comedy. So... well done, Tim? And it’s not that horror-comedy is difficult to do right, it’s just very easy to get wrong. This is a shining example of that which isn't trying to be so bad it's good, it's just an astoundingly painful waste of a neat idea and an otherwise solid cast. The Blackening feels like a reboot of the Scary movie franchise which foregoes the parody set-pieces and moves straight to shrieking, falling over and shit scripted gags.

Horrifying for all the wrong reasons.

*¹ Yes, that Tim Story. The one who directed the first two widely condemned Fantastic Four movies for 20th Century Fox, hopped over to Universal to make Ride Along and then after a period of sombre reflection still went on to make Ride Along 2.
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*² Note: While there are certainly other factors in play, they don't always die first. But why let statistics get in the way of a good generalising trope, especially if your movie is depending on it? ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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