Black Friday (2021)

Look, it's a movie about, among other actors, Bruce Campbell and Michael Jai White as employees in a big toy store on Thanksgiving during an apocalypse. I'm not made of stone!

The movie takes a few minutes at the start to outline the broad strokes of a few of employees. The nervous guy in his early 20s with a crappy family who is germophobic. The divorced dad in his 40s that acts like he's 20. The useless manager (Campbell) and his kiss-ass assistant manager. It's not much, but it's enough to set up relationships and conflicts to come into play when things go wrong.

Which happens quickly. The movie's only 85 minutes, they don't have time to waste People waiting to get in already look sick, but the employees are used to that on holiday sales. But then someone attacks the germophobe and he dumps one of those 12-foot high cages they store the big bouncy balls in on them and things go south. The employees are in disarray, but the movie avoids too high of an initial body count by having the affected be up to something rather than rampaging and killing. It's not clear what or why, but none of these characters are the sort that would be able to figure that out.

All of that allows for the cast to try different approaches. Escape, then lockdown, then a different escape. Each of these splits the characters up into different groups, which allows them to bounce off each other in different ways, highlight their personality traits and how they act as the pressure increases. So it has elements of a zombie horror movie, in that the unaffected are sometimes the biggest threat to each other. Who starts pointing fingers, who turns coward, who does something shitty and tries to justify it after the fact?

It's also a bit of a comedy, in a Sam Raimi, Ash vs. Evil Dead sense (I'm the font Amazon Prime uses for the title on the menu screen is the same as Ash vs. Evil Dead). The characters sit around at one point, discussing how long they've worked at "We Luv Toys" and what the job means to them. They're alternately sad and funny, although mostly sad. People trapped in more than one sense.

The violence certainly has the Raimi excess to it. The affected gradually turning more horrible-looking, weird jaws and pointed teeth. Lots of corn syrup blood and people defending themselves awkwardly with whatever they can find. Whiffle Ball bats, bolt cutters, a broken champagne bottle.