It’s been a while (almost a year and a half) since I last wrote anything in this series but that’s just because you don’t often see good films in the horror comedy genre. Sure, I’ve seen four Toxic Avenger movies, a seemingly deliberately bad Finnish movie called Bunny the Killer Thing (being purposefully bad does not make for a good movie), Two Thousand Maniacs! and so forth. On the other hand, there are some I might want to talk about, like Heart-Eyes, The Ugly Stepsister, Deadstream, Deathgasm, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Slumber Party Massacre… We’ll see. Maybe this series gets another (third) lease on life?

Teen-aged Vicaria (the titular black girl) saw her brother get shot on the street. Instead of accepting his death, she decides to bring him back. When she manages this, a whole new set of problems arise.

Now, weirdly, the only place I’ve seen this called a comedy, is the marketing material. IMDb, RottenTomatoes or Letterboxd don’t see it that way. Is it funny? At times. Once more, this is more about the approach and feel than being a series of skits and jokes and laugh-out-loud moments. Overall, I wouldn’t call this a comedy but you can argue (and people have) that the purpose of genres is specifically marketing, so marketing kind of controls the discussion on this, so I listened to that (although I kind of disagree).

Now, I don’t want to be insensitive. Most of the movie happens in a black neighborhood with problems we often associate to black neighborhoods, mostly drugs. There does seem to be a backlash against this. However, there also seems to be a discrepancy between the reactions in different sites. RottenTomatoes users actually like this movie quite a bit (both critics and audience), while IMDb and Letterboxd audiences are much more negative.

At the same time, I’m fine with black people making movies about the blight of black people and they can bring up how white folk fucked up their lives and still continue to do that. Racism does still exist and racism of the past still reflects on the lives of black people today. You should be working to remove that or at least the negative effects. I don’t want to tell black people to stop fighting for themselves and this movie was made by a pretty much all-black cast and crew. Also, at no point did I see anything I felt was unfair.

The movie does work as horror as well. At times this feels like the movie doesn’t really know where it wants to go and what to do with the titular monster. We don’t see it very much. I guess my problem is that the monster is supposed to be a fear of something and I don’t quite get what. This might be my lack of understanding of the culture but in the movie we encounter various things it could symbolize, like overpolicing black neighborhoods and drugs, both of which are involved in the death of the brother but I just don’t see how the monster is supposed to represent those.

Still, a movie worth a watch.