Director – Casey Tebo, Screenplay – Andy Greskoviak, Producers – Bruce Campbell & Warner Davis, Photography – David Kruta, Music – Patrick Stump, Visual Effects Supervisor – Daniel Delpurgatorio, Visual Effects – White Rhino VFX (Supervisor – Daniel Saldivar), Special Effects Supervisor – Michael Ricci, Creatures & Makeup Effects – Robert Kurtzman MUFX, Prosthetics – Designs to Deceive (Supervisor – Joshua Turi), Angry Gran – Norman Cabrera Monsters, Mega Shopper – Autonomous FX Inc. Production Design – Jarrett Staaf. Production Company – Warner Davis Company.
Cast
Bruce Campbell (Jonathan), Devon Sawa (Ken), Ivana Baquero (Marnie), Ryan Lee (Chris), Stephen Peck (Brian), Michael Jai White (Archie), Louis Kurtzman (Emmett), Celeste Olivia (Anita), Ellen Colton (Ruth)
Plot
A meteorite strikes through the roof at a We R Toys store, leaving behind a pulsating lifeform. The employees arrive at the store for the Black Friday sale. As the shoppers are let in, they come in contact with the alien lifeform, which causes them to mutate into zombies. Soon the store is overrun by maddened zombies, tearing one another apart and devouring flesh. In the midst of this, the staff try to survive and make it to safety.
Black Friday – which is not related to or should not be confused with the Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi mad scientist/bodyswap film Black Friday (1940) – was the second film from director Casey Tebo. Tebo rose up through the ranks of music video with work for Aerosmith in particular, before making Happy Birthday! (2016), a modestly effective horror film about a party of tourists imprisoned by a Mexican cartel.
Black Friday comes with reasonable promise. Both genre legend Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa have even signed on as producers. Not to mention the film has a great central idea where the maddened mobs on Black Friday – the first Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US where shops offer items at heavily discounted rates – becomes actual zombies. I am sure I saw exactly floating this around as an internet meme somewhere and is an idea that seemed only to be waiting for someone to jump on it. Around the same time, there was also the Canadian-made Slaxx (2020), another satiric work about the horror of working in a retail outlet store.
The employees of We R Toys at siege from zombified shoppers – (l to r) Bruce Campbell, Stephen Peck, Ryan Lee, Michael Jai White, Ivana Baquero, Devon Sawa and Ellen Colton
The film comes in a Horror Comedy vein. It sets up a reasonable bunch of characters and their sharply delineated comic foibles and sets them loose against the horde in the store. Thereafter the film becomes fairly much another variant on the Zombie Film with the characters running about the store trying to avoid attack or despatching the infected with a good deal of splatter and gore. The effects, particularly the pulsating mass of the alien creature that looks like something out of The Blob (1988), are quite accomplished.
On the other hand, this is a film where you reach the end and feel like it should have been much funnier than it ended up being. There are comic scenes set up, some likeably amusing characters – but a lack of anything that goes for laughs or even just a few snappy and funny one-liners. It feels like a film that has somehow missed the potential it promised to hold.
