You know, for the longest time within horror, the only two Black people to survive were two legendary rappers, LL Cool J, and Ice Cube. Maybe their personas made those filmmakers and the viewers at the time believe that they couldn’t die. Yet it continued that Black folks died very quickly in most horror movies, even with outliers like Brandy popping up and the Scary Movie franchise popping up. Yet as we’ve gotten to a new era of horror cinema, post Blumhouse and all of James Wan’s hits along with films by Jordan Peele that adds Black Horror to the mainstream, I feel the image of the past, the Black people dying first still looms over it all. That is the place where The Blackening uses to poke at. Here we have a group of friends coming together for a Juneteenth weekend getaway hosted by Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharoah), but what they learn is that the Airbnb they rented is really a trap designed by racists to kill them. Still, our group isn’t going out like that.
So let’s get this out of the way; this is a full-on comedy. While it uses the horror tropes we’ve seen in torture porn or slasher movies, it has more in line with Scary Movie than a reinvention of the genre as we’ve seen of late. It’s just plain funny. We have Antoinette Robertson as Lisa, Sinqua Walls as Nnamdi, and Dewayne Perkins as Dewayne as, like the core group of characters. You know what I mean in horror movies, we have that true core of “heroes,” and that’s these three, with Lisa and Dewayne being best friends and Nnamdi as Lisa’s love interest. There’s some good comedy here and natural chemistry here regarding their interactions and relationships with each other. Then we have Melvin Gregg as King, Grace Byers as Allison, and X Mayo as Shanika as our real comedic reaction core. They are here for them real jokes, they are here to get them off and bring out the big laughs, and they succeed in that throughout. Then we have Jermaine Fowler as Clifton as, the butt of the jokes, the one that doesn’t fit in and is almost forgotten. While he’s very much coded as a stereotype, his performance makes it work in the film. He rounds out the cast well and fits in nicely for the audience.
Don’t go into this film for surprises. It’s a movie that uses tropes to great success in how it skewers the genre. This movie surprised me with just how funny it was. It feels like something that can be watched over and over again. This is a movie that, to me, can work later on for viewing parties, cookouts, and the like. The filmmakers and the cast should be proud of their work. The Blackening is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in the last few years and kills as a horror parody. Go out and support this good movie.
Score: B+
RIOTUS 