The Blackening: Not such a much

The Blackening (2023) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for violence, drug use and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theater

By Derrick Bang

Given the clichés and predictable plot pitfalls into which most modern horror films fall, director Tim Story and his writers — Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins — deserve credit for some cogent social commentary, and for trying to shake things up a bit.

 

With no clue where their attacker might be hiding, Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) arms
herself with a heavy wooden candle holder ... and lots of prayers.

Alas, “trying” is as far as they get. At the end of the day, this becomes just another tiresome example of the “idiot plot” … which lurches forward, from one moment to the next, solely because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times.

On top of which, these are insufferable chatty idiots.

 

Not even halfway through this increasingly tiresome flick, one wishes everybody would shut up for 5 minutes, so that Story and editor Peter S. Elliot could generate some actual tension.

 

The setting is ye old cabin in the woods (although, as one character points out, it’s more a good-sized house than a cramped cabin). Lisa (Antoinette Robertson, a plucky heroine) and her long-unseen college friends — King (Melvin Gregg), Allison (Grace Byers), Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Clifton (Jermaine Fowler, badly overplaying his role), Dewayne (Perkins) and Shanika (X Mayo) — have gathered for a Juneteenth reunion. The sole items on the agenda: recreational drugs, too much alcohol, a bit of sex and a weekend-long Spades marathon. 

 

(The card game, of course.) 

 

(But yes, that choice is a bit on the nose.)

 

Pretty much before anybody can blink, they all wind up trapped in the “Game Room,” which features a game called The Blackening. The game board’s centerpiece is an offensively retro, three-dimensional, minstrel-style face … which talks. 

 

It instructs them to play the game, which consists of Trivial Pursuit-style cards designed to test their knowledge of Black culture: “Name five Black actors who guest-starred on Friends,” “Recite the second verse of the Black National Anthem,” and so forth.

 

Within 60 seconds, for each question. 

 

Failure to play along … will result in death.

 

What this septet doesn’t know — what we’ve already seen, during the story’s prologue — is that the first two guests, Shawn (Jay Pharoah) and Morgan (Yvonne Orji), arrived earlier, and immediately ran afoul of a hulking thug in a blackface mask, wielding a wicked crossbow.