Black Friday — The Day Terror Turned into a Turkey (And Not Because of the Stuffing)

Black Friday: full review

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The slasher is dead. Not a metaphor—a clinical diagnosis. After decades of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Scream, the genre has become a rotting corpse with only two options left: bury it with dignity or jolt it back to life with cheap nostalgia shocks. Eli Roth, the same guy who gifted us Hostel (and its unnecessary sequel) and The Green Inferno (a festival of bad taste even cannibals rejected), has chosen the latter. Black Friday—or Thanksgiving, as it’s known in its homeland—is his latest attempt to revive the irrevivable. And, as expected, the result is as appetizing as a Thanksgiving turkey reheated three days later: it looks edible, but the second you take a bite, you realize something reeks of rot.

The premise is so painfully simple it hurts: a masked killer in a turkey costume (yes, you read that right) terrorizes a town during Black Friday, that day of unfettered consumerism when Americans trample each other for a 50-inch TV. Roth, who’d flirted with the idea in a fake trailer for Grindhouse (2007), decided it was time to stretch that two-minute joke into a 107-minute feature. The problem isn’t the premise itself—horror cinema has always found inspiration in the absurd—but that Roth seems to believe a ridiculous concept and a couple of gore scenes are enough to make a movie. Spoiler: they’re not. Black Friday is a soulless slasher, devoid of tension and, worst of all, surprises. It’s as if someone took The 10-Step Slasher Manual and followed it to the letter, forgetting to add Step 11: Make the audience feel something.

The filming of Black Friday was, by all accounts, as chaotic as the Black Friday it depicts. Roth, who also produced the film, grappled with a tight budget (rumored to be around $15 million—a pittance for a slasher with blockbuster aspirations) and a cast that, save for a few exceptions, looks plucked from a Degrassi casting call but with even less charisma. Patrick Dempsey, Grey’s Anatomy’s McDreamy, plays Sheriff Eric Newlon, a guy more concerned with his hair than catching a killer slaughtering his town. It’s not Dempsey’s fault—the man does what he can with the material—but it’s impossible not to wonder what the hell an actor of his caliber is doing in a movie that reeks of a Syfy original. The rest of the cast, led by TikTok influencer Addison Rae (yes, that Addison Rae) and young Milo Manheim, is reduced to screaming, running, and dying in increasingly predictable ways. The chemistry between them is nonexistent, as if Roth had rounded up a group of strangers in a mall and told them, Improvise.

But the real problem with Black Friday isn’t its cast, nor even its ridiculous premise. The problem is that Roth, a director once hailed as Tarantino’s heir in horror cinema, seems to have lost his way. His style, once a mix of extreme violence and dark humor, here devolves into a parade of poorly executed clichés. Jeff Rendell’s script, a Roth regular, is so predictable you could guess every plot twist just by watching the trailer. The characters are archetypes without depth: the final girl, the jock, the nerd, the weary sheriff... They could’ve stepped out of a Scooby-Doo episode, minus the charm. And then there’s the killer, that John Carver (yes, that’s his name) with his turkey mask and butcher knife. Roth tries to give him a tragic backstory—something about a childhood trauma tied to Thanksgiving—but the result is so forced it feels like a bad joke. Can anyone really take seriously a guy lopping off heads dressed as poultry?

Direction and staging: Roth on autopilot

Eli Roth isn’t a bad director. He’s a lazy one. Black Friday is definitive proof that when he’s not interested in a project, he just phones it in. The film is shot with functional cinematography by Milan Chadima, who at least has the decency not to ape the visual style of Halloween (2018) or Scream (2022). The shots are competent, the framing safe, but there’s not a single memorable image. It’s as if Roth delegated all the visual work to his DP and limited himself to yelling Action! every time a death scene rolled around. Speaking of deaths, there are plenty, but none stand out. Roth, who showed creativity with gore in Hostel, here settles for generic decapitations and predictable stabbings. The most ridiculous moment comes when the killer uses a deep fryer (yes, an industrial fryer) to off one of his victims. It’s grotesque, sure, but so absurd it’s hard not to laugh.

The editing, by veteran George Folsey Jr. (The Hunger Games), is another weak point. The pacing is uneven: some scenes drag unnecessarily (like a 20-minute prologue that adds nothing), while others zip by so fast you don’t have time to process what just happened. Brandon Roberts’ score is so generic it could soundtrack any horror movie from the last 20 years. The jump scares sound like they were plucked from a stock sound library, and the tension music is so predictable you could hum it before it plays. Roth, who proved he could craft an oppressive atmosphere in Cabin Fever, here seems to have forgotten how it’s done.

Performances: A cast lost in the mall

If anything saves Black Friday from total disaster, it’s Nell Verlaque’s performance as Jessica Wright, the requisite final girl. Verlaque, a Canadian actress with more talent than experience, manages to convey something resembling humanity in a character who’d otherwise be a walking cliché. Her Jessica isn’t the typical helpless girl who screams and runs: she’s got guts, makes stupid decisions (as all good slasher characters do), and even faces off against the killer with a kitchen knife. It’s not an awards-worthy performance, but at least it proves someone in this cast took the movie seriously. The rest, however, seem to be on another planet.

Patrick Dempsey, as mentioned, is wasted. His Sheriff Eric Newlon is a character without nuance, a guy who shifts from indifference to panic in seconds without any transition. Dempsey tries to inject some charisma, but the script won’t let him. Addison Rae, meanwhile, is a disaster. The former TikTok star, who already showed her limitations in He’s All That (2021), seems lost here. Her Gabriella Hearts is a flat, personality-free character, and her chemistry with Milo Manheim (Ryan Baker) is nonexistent. Manheim, who rose to fame in Zombies (2018), does what he can, but his character is so generic you’ll forget him five minutes after he dies. The rest of the cast—Jalen Thomas Brooks, Tomaso Sanelli, Jenna Warren—are reduced to playing designated victims, screaming and dying without leaving a trace.

The best

• Nell Verlaque: The only one who makes her character sound like something other than a Word template. Jessica Wright has moments of clarity, and Verlaque nails them. She’s no Meryl Streep, but at least she doesn’t look like she’s reading her lines.

• The prologue: The first 10 minutes, with the Black Friday chaos and the accident that kicks off the plot, are the most dynamic part of the film. Roth proves he still knows how to shoot chaotic action scenes—then promptly forgets how.

• The killer’s mask: As ridiculous as it is, John Carver’s turkey mask is the most memorable thing about the movie. It’s so absurd it becomes iconic, like Ghostface or Jason Voorhees. Roth should’ve trademarked it.

The worst

• Jeff Rendell’s script: A festival of clichés, predictable twists, and dialogue that sounds like a bad joke. If the slasher is a dead genre, Rendell is the coroner signing the death certificate.

The lack of tension: Roth forgets that horror isn’t just about screams and blood—it’s about atmosphere. Black Friday* is so predictable you can guess every death before it happens.

• Addison Rae: Her performance is so bad it makes the rest of the cast look like the Royal Shakespeare Company. If this is the future of cinema, bring on the apocalypse.

The score: Brandon Roberts composes a soundtrack so generic it could work for Insidious or The Conjuring*. There’s not a single original note.

• The third act: The movie deflates like a punctured balloon. What promised to be an epic climax turns into a rushed succession of absurd resolutions.

The Verdict of Claqueta Ácida

Black Friday is what happens when a talented director settles for the bare minimum. Eli Roth, who once gifted us Hostel and Cabin Fever, here resembles a film student working on their final project. The script is predictable, the performances mediocre (with a few honorable exceptions), and the direction so lazy it’s painful. That said, the killer’s mask is so ridiculous it ends up being the only memorable thing about the movie. If you’re looking for a decent slasher, watch Scream (2022) or X (2022). If you want a bad but entertaining slasher, check out Freaky (2020). If you’re after a slasher that feels like it was made by someone who hates the genre, Black Friday is your movie. Happy Thanksgiving. 💀

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