There was a part of me that actively wondered if it would be appropriate for me, a white man, to go see The Blackening on Juneteenth. That’s a serious holiday for a lot of people, one commemorating, basically, the end of slavery. Meanwhile, The Blackening is a horror comedy advertised as mocking, among other things, the old cliche that the Black guy dies first can be complicated when all of the characters in that scenario are Black. I figured it would probably be OK, and my Gabbing Geek pal Watson actually suggested showing some love (through ticket sales) to Black filmmakers would be very appropriate for the day, and I was leaning that way anyway.
Point is, I did see it on Juneteenth, but given I only put up one article per day if any, the review isn’t going up until now.
A group of college friends are gathering at a remote cabin in the woods to celebrate Juneteenth. Mutual friends of theirs had already gone to the cabin but something happened to them. Among the assembled are professional Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), her on-again-off-again love interest Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), openly gay Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins), biracial Allison (Grace Byers), former gangsta King (Melvin Gregg), and the hard-partying Shanika (X Mayo). Also, there’s Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), an awkward nerdy type that they don’t remember very well. The weekend starts off well enough all things being equal until the group finds the game room. And in there, there’s a very racist board game called “The Blackening”.
From here, things start to turn deadly. A mysterious masked man, who is holding one of their missing hosts hostage, tells the group that they need to play the game or else. Refusing to play the game will result in death, and this killer is very handy with a crossbow. There’s an old cliche about how the Black person dies first in a horror movie, and the killer seems well-versed in Black culture, with all the questions on the trivia cards of the board game being aimed in that general direction. It may be that these folks will need to be the blackest they’ve ever been to survive the night. But isn’t that the sort of thing that can get a character in a movie like this killed?
As far as the movie goes, it’s fun. The characters are engaging and often funny. I suspect some of what I saw might have worked better for me if I was more familiar with the culture myself, but I did like what I saw quite a bit. The promised scene from the trailers where the killer offers to let the others go if they sacrifice the Blackest person in the group is a relatively minor thing, but the way they each try to suggest someone is or isn’t Black enough is an easy highlight for me. This is the sort of movie that knows the cliches of horror movies and makes good use of turning them on their head, not unlike, say, Scream.
Now, I will admit the identity of the killer didn’t surprise me that much in the grand scheme of things, and the movie felt like it went a little too long in the final act, but I had a lot of fun with this. It had all the sorts of jokes I generally like, including a bit of metahumor here and there in regards to, among other things, casting. Check this one out.
Grade: B
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