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The Blackening Review
Image Credit: Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
Loading...NOTE: Light spoilers for The Blackening!
With The Blackening on June 16th, I have hit 50 new release movies seen so far this year! Well on my way to 100, my target for the year.
This is after I blew right through my goal of 300 movies total in 2022!
Movie-watching goals are fun and are in no way weirdly obsessive or time-consuming or distracting from other things you should be doing in your life like writing or working on your podcast or spending time with your wife or watching more Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
I’m fine. It’s fine. This is FINE.
There is absolutely no way to know what 2023 Movie #100 will be this year, but I’m kind of happy that this movie ended up being my halfway point. Coming into the year, I had certainly never heard of The Blackening, so of course there its no way I could have had any hype for it. But upon first seeing the trailer for it a few months ago, I was all the way in. So I’ve been eagerly awaiting this release for a while now!
Based on the trailer, The Blackening appeared to be a kind of… Black Culture Meets The Cabin In The Woods type product. A movie that takes place within a horror movie, while also poking respectful fun at horror movie conventions. But it’s doing so through a specific cultural lens of a population of American citizens who typically love horror as a genre, even as their representation in it has not always been the best… to the point where that representation’s biggest contribution to the zeitgeist of that genre is that they are historically the first character to die in it.
Th movie itself sees a group of friends from college–I believe there are nine in total, though two are dispatched in the build-up, giving us a more manageable seven characters to deal with–getting together for the first time in years to have a Juneteenth blow-out party at a cabin rental. Which happens to be, yes, out in the woods.
Sidenote: My wife loves such cabins for long weekends, but is also terrified of them. Years ago, we rented a cabin with our friends, and while outside making S’Mores, we heard another group of vacationers yell “Woo!” way off in the distance. She was terrified the rest of the night that there were people literally within shouting distance, so OF COURSE they would come kill us that night.
Anyway, the revelers of this movie end up trapped in their cabin and forced to play a game–the titular The Blackening–for their lives. A masked man is out to kill them, and the friends have to make use of their knowledge of horror tropes, trust in each other, and… telepathy (?) to survive.
The group, of course, has some issues. Two of them who dated disastrously in college are secretly back together, the best friend of one of those two hating the new/old partner. And a friend they all barely remember even knowing from college has been invited, too. So as they have to stick together to survive, their secrets start coming out, making it all harder for them to do so.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ I’m not super familiar with anyone in this cast, which is assuredly my loss because they all do a really great job with their characters. Jermaine Fowler as Clifton is bit over the top, but in this weirdly adorable way. I’m not going to say I ever bought into his character as a real person who would have his speech pattern and mannerisms, but screw that, because he was clearly having such a good time in the role that I never cared.
In addition to Fowler, Grace Byers as Allison was exceptionally strong. She commanded every moment she was on screen. And Melvin Gregg as King had some perfect comedic delivery on his lines and physical performance after suffering an injury at the hands of the masked killer. Honestly, like I said, everyone here is no worse than “perfectly good”, so I was into this ensemble work.
+ After a somewhat slow start, once the meat of the story is churning and the humor really kicks in, and The Blackening is a borderline riot. The situation is silly, the jokes are impactful, and the actors–as noted above–are all game. To be fair, Horror-Comedy is a genre I have a particular infatuation with, but trust me when I say it’s not always done right. That’s not the case here. It’s not perfectly balanced–it’s definitely more Comedy than Horror–but the comedy was the main selling point, and that lands.
– When you get to the ending and the reveals start spilling out, the movie somehow gives you both the easily predictable ending you saw coming AND one you could never have reasoned out because it’s all based on Facts Not Presented In Evidence. It’s so wildly frustrating to get one unveiling, go “Oh, well everyone saw that coming”, but then when you get more info, everything relies on information the movie never gave you because it happened off-screen in these characters’ lives.
On the one hand, I want to say “it’s not that big of a deal” because the movie is more about the comedic and slasher elements than about being a mystery. But on the other hand, when a movie spends time doing a reveal and monologuing details that we were never privy to… it’s annoying! It’s just exposition that doesn’t clarify what we saw, the characters could be saying anything because none of it matters to us, and it’s all just a big cheat by the screenwriters. Show, don’t tell!
– This is a minor quibble, but the movie doesn’t really play with horror tropes as much as I thought it would. You’ve got the bit that they sold in the trailer with the Allison character nauseated by her own suggestion that the group splits up, but other than that, it doesn’t play with conventions nearly to the level of something like the aforementioned Cabin In The Woods.
It does its own thing instead, and that’s great, but it really just wasn’t what I was expecting, you know?
For more Ups And Downs and movie reviews, check out the Stew World Order podcast where he exclusively handle Comic Book movies. Our current episode, #67, takes a look at Scott Pilgrim Vs The World! Episodes available at our site or wherever you listen to podcasts!
