BEFORE: This could be the fastest month in human history - didn't it JUST start a few days ago with October 1 and now, somehow, the month is half over? WTF, where did October go, I'm about to go away for a week and when I come back there will be just a few days left! Time is moving faster, it's the only possible explanation. I realize I watched 15 films now, so there's just 9 left, and I need to get two more watched after tonight before we head down South.
But this film has the word "Friday" in the title, so I'm kind of forced to delay the review until Friday, to post this on Thursday doesn't seem right. Come on, I watched TWO "Freaky Friday" movies in January on a Friday and I watched the documentary "Sunday Best" on a Sunday. You have to learn to read these signs from the universe... So even if I have to watch TWO films tomorrow on Saturday, I'm delaying this review until Friday, because there you go. It's what The Chain wants me to do...
Mark Steger carries over from "The Curse of Bridge Hollow".
THE PLOT: A group of toy story employees must protect each other from a horde of parasite-infected shoppers.
AFTER: I know, I know, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, and it's when some people start (and/or finish) their Christmas shopping, so I'm either a month early or two months early, but this is still a horror movie at the end of the day, so I'm watching it in October. Really, I'm at the intersection of Halloween and Thanksgiving tonight, plus an alien invasion to boot - but we did go into a couple of dollar stores recently, and decorations and housewares representing ALL THREE fall-idays are currently being sold. You can call that "The Nightmare Before Christmas" or you can call it "All Hallow's Christmas Eve", or some variation on Chrismukkuh that works in Halloween and Thanksgiving. However you celebrate - but if you live in Canada, I think Thanksgiving comes earlier, like between Octoberfest and Halloween. Just saying.
And Christmas IS a horror-filled time, if you work in retail. That's kind of the point here as nobody who works for the "We Love Toys" store is psyched about Black Friday, in fact most of them aren't psyched about ANY aspect of their lives. If you work there, it apparently mean something has gone wrong in your life - you're divorced, you only see your kids every other weekend, or you're too young to have a better career, or you're too OLD to have a better career. Or maybe your life just took a bad turn at some point, it happens, drugs or alcohol or prison time may have been involved, but you're here now, working at a toy store, so that's your lot in life, at least for the time being.
But if you think things can't get any worse, man, you're like WAY off. How about mysterious objects falling from the sky? How about people being turned into goo piles after coming in contact with those objects? Worse, some people are being turned into mindless killers who have alien-like faces and make horrible growls and clicking noises. This has bits of "The Crazies" with bits of "The Thing" worked in. I mean, yeah, sure, aliens are real, that's kind of great except their pods or whatever are turning humans into something non-human that wants to un-alive all the other people in the store. And as with last night's film, it takes WAY TOO LONG for people to figure out exactly what is happening and how it came about. News reports are sketchy, but apparently this is taking place in other stores and malls across the area. So it's a bit hard to say if this is a true invasion or if this was just something that fell out of a visiting UFO and it's not just alien, it's "alien" to us, in that we don't understand what it is or how it works.
Naturally, the store manager refuses to shut the place down and/or evacuate the store, he's got a directive from corporate to make as much money as possible on Black Friday, hence the store opening at midnight with deals that have attracted shoppers from all over. But then the alien pods landed, and it's almost as if leaving your Thanksgiving celebration to get in line for the Black Friday deals at your local toy store or mall or whatever is a terrible, ill-advised idea. Yeah, well, it kind of is, even before the pods landed.
After some initial disbelief - and writing up Chris, who fought back against a customer who was trying to eat him, but come on, Chris, that's not how we treat our customers at We Love Toys, now is it? We covered this in the training session, you can NOT kill the customers, even if they try to kill you first. EVEN if they try to infect you with the alien virus and turn you into a subservient half-alien creature who just wants to gather, gather more stuff. We're here to sell to the aliens, too, CHRIS, their money (if they use money) or their space credits is perfectly acceptable, we can ask them at the register how they want to pay for all the stuff they broke.
About that, yeah, umm, what ARE the zombie alien space mutants doing, exactly? They're gathering a bunch of stuff together, or maybe it's their formerly human bodies, who can say? Either way they're creating a big purplish-pinkish glowing bio-mass that seems to hypnotize or calm other zombie alien space mutants and bring them all closer together. Well, that just can't be good, whatever they're building or forming or coalescing into. Look, in a very short time this movie tries to be a horror movie, a Thanksgiving movie, an alien invasion movie, a gore-fest, an action film, an us-against-them paranoia flick and a locked-room character study. It's a lot to try and accomplish in a very tight window of time, it's like somebody ran a focus group and determined that people won't watch a horror film that's longer than 90 minutes, but we can still get this done and be home in time to start planning our own holiday meal.
Well, if you do work retail you probably have a rotating cast of co-workers of your own, and new people are always joining "the team" and other people are always leaving when they retire or quit or get a better gig, that's just the way of things. If you just imagine that those people got turned by the zombie aliens or eaten or killed or they joined the collective biomass, you kind of end up with this film. And let's face it, the people that you spend so many work-hours with kind of are your family, even with work-related issues and such you may get along with them better than you do with your actual family. So you can relate, right? Just imagine a sign at your job that says "It's been 00 days since our last alien invasion." and you get this fun (?) little B-movie.
My apologies have to go out to Bruce Campbell, I've been planning a marathon of his horror films (and as you may imagine, there are quite a few) for quite some time. The way the chain worked out this year, I just couldn't work them all in, maybe if I weren't going on vacation, I could have done more, but as it stands it's just this ONE film. If I included the "Evil Dead" films and "Army of Darkness" and "Bubba Ho-Tep" and "From Dusk to Dawn 2" and other works by Sam Raimi, it wouldn't put me in a place where I could get where I need to be for my own Thanksgiving this year. So I don't think he'll be making the year-end countdown this year after just "Black Friday" and "Serving Sara", but he is a horror legend and I promise to get around to more of his films one of these Octobers, maybe next year.
Directed by Casey Tebo
Also starring Devon Sawa (last seen in "Gasoline Alley"), Ivana Baquero (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Ryan Lee (last seen in "Shorts"), Stevie Peck, Michael Jai White (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Louie Kurtzman, Celeste Oliva (last seen in "American Fiction"), Ellen Colton (last seen in "The Company Men"), Cindy Lentol (ditto), Peg Holzemer (last seen in "Gone Baby Gone"), Andria Blackman (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Mike Murphy, Christopher Mikael (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Stanley Bruno, Lonnie Farmer (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Ripley Thibeault, Matea Thibeault, Bates Wilder (also last seen in "American Fiction"), Randy Jay Burrell (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy") and the voice of Seth Green (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force").
RATING: 6 out of 10 Dour Dennis dolls that were recalled and you can NOT sell them, OK, Chris? They're a fire hazard (thank God). I'm not quite sure where they were going with this gag though...
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