It’s fill in the blanks time. A group of people are trapped in a cabin/house/shopping mall, and are surrounded by aliens/zombies/killer spiders and are slowly picked off one at a time until only a few remain. Sound familiar? If if you are a fan of horror movies it should, because it’s a fairly common plotline. Typically the films that follow it are low budget, with plenty of cheesy lines and lots of shlock. Black Friday is the latest addition to the genre, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

On Thanksgiving night a meteor shower strikes Earth, with each of the rocks carrying a deadly alien parasite. For the disgruntled employees at a toy store forced to work the night shift to prepare for Black Friday sales it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. After all, the store is already surrounded by hungry hoards of holiday shoppers who are easily turned into monstrous creatures looking to murder everyone in their path.  The employees know they are in for the fight of their lives, and that they all might not escape, but they aren’t ready to give up.

There’s no getting around it, Black Friday is a B Movie. It even stars Bruce Campbell, the king of B Movies. Campbell doesn’t disappoint either, throwing corny one liners out almost every time he speaks. The rest of the cast is filled out as you would expect from a B Movie too. The reluctant hero who is too blind to see that he’s a loser (Chucky’s Devon Sawa), the chicken-shit geek (My Dead Ex’s Ryan Lee), the token female (High Seas‘ Ivana Baquero) and the bad-ass (Pump‘s Michael Jai White). For a B Movie the special effects are actually better than you would expect, which help keep you interested. The story follows the regular beats though, which makes the film pretty predictable.

All in all Black Friday isn’t a bad movie, it’s just not one you’d watch again after seeing it once.  It’s fun for what it is, and would be even more fun to watch with a group of guys goofing around and having a couple of drinks on a Friday night. Or maybe a Thanksgiving night, after the football games are done and you are relaxing on the couch digesting the turkey.