The Blackening Review: A Horror Comedy That Is Neither Funny Or Scary

There are few things that I want more than a robust and thriving resurgence of theatrical comedies. For all the whizz-bang spectacle you can put on a gigantic screen, there's almost nothing more satisfying than just a group of people laughing at a hysterical picture together. I will take a hardy guffaw from an audience over a cheer any day of the week and twice on Sundays, and for the last few years, those pure comedies have been hard to come by as the mainstream theatrical market has essentially pivoted to three kinds of movies: action franchise blockbusters, moderately low-budget horror flicks, and animated kids films. If you want to make a comedy nowadays, they usually need to be smuggled into one of those boxes. You can have jokes, but they'll be wrapped up in the package of a superhero movie.

One of the more tried and true genre mashups in Hollywood has been the horror comedy. Whether it's Bud Abbott and Lou Costello meeting one of the Universal monsters, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder having fun with Mary Shelley's classic tale with "Young Frankenstein," or the Wayans brothers goofing on the 1990s slasher resurgence with "Scary Movie," there has long been this feeling that generating a laugh is not all that different from generating a scream, and it makes sense why someone like Jordan Peele can shift from sketch comedy to some of the best horror of the last decade.

However, just because something is tried and true doesn't mean the results are always going to be extraordinary. Enter "The Blackening," the latest addition to the horror comedy canon, and it is sadly one of the more disappointing ones in recent memory, especially given the potential of its premise. For a film that could either be an extremely sharp satire of the horror genre or a silly gagfest, it lands in the most milquetoast middle ground imaginable, leaning on tired jokes and undercooked commentary that feel like Twitter from five or six years ago.

"The Blackening" purposefully has a premise very familiar to the horror genre. A group of friends come together for a reunion for a weekend at a cabin in the woods. What is unfamiliar is that it is a group of Black friends, folks generally off at the fringes of horror, and they are celebrating Juneteenth, with enough booze and molly to have a grand old time. Amongst the group are a pair of on-again/off-again lovers (Antoinette Robinson and Sinqua Walls), a reformed gangster with a white wife (Melvin Gregg), a boisterous partier (X Mayo), a supportive gay friend (co-writer Dewayne Perkins), a woman often teased for being biracial (Grace Byers), and a nerd (Jermaine Fowler), whose invitation is baffling to everyone. All of them are types, and each one is playing exactly into the type. Fowler is the worst offender, someone so self-consciously doing a Steve Urkel riff that it's distracting.

The group soon discovers a "game room" in the house they are renting, and already set out for them is the titular game is a horrifically racist trivia game that has been devised by a masked killer looking to kill off this group one by one, starting with the two members of the friends' group who got there first (Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharaoh). With this kind of setup, you would think that the prompts and questions in the game would be related to Black people's history within the horror genre, but outside of two questions, the game has nothing to do with that. Instead, it opts for so many lazy references to just general Black culture, like whether or not they can remember hip-hop lyrics or name five Black characters who appeared on "Friends."

The characters' Blackness may be the reason why they are being targeted, but the actual events of the story have very little to do with it. The structure of the film basically plays out as any other cabin in the woods slasher would, and if the characters do something that normally a white character would do, they wink at it slightly and simply go on to do the trope anyway. "The Blackening" operates as if it's an insightful satire of Black horror, but the depth of its subversiveness is about as shallow as a teaspoon. That would be okay if the jokes at least landed, but they very rarely do. Outside of a recurring gag about how this group can quietly communicate with one another, I found myself sinking further and further into my seat rather than being lifted up with laughter.

For genre commentaries or parodies to work, there still needs to be some semblance of a story you care about. For as gag-filled and outrageous as "Airplane!" is, you still want Robert Hays' Ted Striker to land the plane. There's some tension in that to keep you pulled along, and when the jokes do land, they act as an even bigger release. "The Blackening" really struggles in this regard. In the 20 years since "Barbershop," director Tim Story has tried mightily to recapture any sense of comedy and storytelling, and recent calamities like 2019's "Shaft" and 2021's "Tom & Jerry" firmly put that into perspective. You would hope that a movie like "The Blackening," another movie with a big Black ensemble like his breakout film, could bring him back to that balance, but he has absolutely no handle on the horror genre.

Each of the horror set pieces, be it hiding from the killer or creeping down a dark hallway, are awkwardly handled with uninspired framing and edited with a tremendous amount of slack, which is rare for a 96-minute movie. The lighting feels completely purposeless, not utilizing shadows in any interesting way that is so important to building tension in a horror film. When the script of the film references films like "Get Out" and Scream 2," all you can do is think about how much more dynamic those pictures look and feel than this one.

That "Scream 2" reference comes within the first few minutes of the film. Wes Craven's "Scream" films are the high watermark for this kind of movie. They find just the right blend of commentary, horror, and comedy, and by name-checking it so early, you are setting yourself up for a comparison that you better make sure you can make. "The Blackening" doesn't. When the characters are posited with the notion that the Black character always dies first in a horror movie and they must decide which of them is the "Blackest," there is so much to mine there in terms of stereotyping, societal expectations, genre expectations, and more. But "The Blackening" is content to make a couple of easy observations and move on from the idea. It cuts itself off from actually maximizing what a great idea it is. If a meta-horror comedy can't nail its commentary, horror, or comedy, then it sadly isn't doing much.

/Film Rating: 3.5 out of 10