Moving only slightly forward in the holiday theme week, we’re going from Thanksgiving to Black Friday. I had been wanting to see this for a while. You’ve got a pretty stacked cast with Michael Jai White, Devon Sawa, and the main man himself, Bruce Campbell. And who doesn’t love a good zombie movie with capitalism trappings?

The movie takes place at a store called We Luv Toys on the night of Thanksgiving for one of those midnight Black Friday sales. We mostly focus on Ken (Sawa), the divorced dad and coolest guy at the retail store. He and his fellow employees are getting ready to deal with the hell of working on Black Friday when it gets even more hellish due to an infection being spread by meteorites. The infection causes people to not just turn zombie-ish but to also begin to transform into something else. It’s up to a bunch of coworkers that barely tolerate each other to try to save themselves from a horde of infected shoppers and whatever it is that they are gathering to do in the middle of the store.

Let’s face it, the script for this movie isn’t going to wow anybody. The trope of consumers as zombies is an old one at this point and the characters aren’t exactly fleshed out beyond having pretty singular traits. Single Dad. Germaphobe. Shitty Manager. Woman. Old Woman. What makes the movie worth watching is the way that it presents these very tired cliches with gusto. The twist of the zombies being an alien infection makes it at least far more visually interesting. They end up infecting people with these strands of white goo that kind of look like when a sea cucumber shoots its guts out of its body. It looks great and the way they slowly keep changing as the movie goes on looks awesome. Big respect to the special effects team on this one.

The comedy in this movie varies wildly from some genuinely funny interactions between the characters to some bad jokes to the baffling inclusion of a depressed talking teddy bear named Dour Dennis (voiced by Seth Green) that gets way more screen time than that premise deserves. For a horror comedy, this does end up having at least a couple good scares in it. The effects budget goes more towards the infected than any kind of gore or over the top violence. Which is almost a shame because you cast Michael Jai White in the film and he barely gets to kick ass at all. Why even put him in your movie if you aren’t going to let him do some badass shit? It was fun to see Campbell in a very much not leading man role as a shit heel manager but he feels a bit wasted as well. There’s only so much anyone can do with very one note characters.

In all, it was a decently fun movie to watch. Definitely the kind of popcorn flick that you could put on for friends that don’t generally like horror and still have a good time.

Score: 3.5 out of 5