Black Friday

  I was hoping this'd be a Thanksgiving review, but that'll have to wait as my local cinema chose to push it back to the shitty screens. So we're doing Black Friday instead.

 It's one of those B-movies that banks on the recognizability of it stars, and to be fair it's assembled a pretty great ensemble: Michael Jai White! Bruce Campbell! Ivana Baquero! Devon Sawa! And Seth Green, I guess. Unfortunately it hands them a pretty shitty script.
 Everything takes place around the midnight opening of a toy superstore, one that's unfortunately been hit by an alien meteorite that turns everyone it comes in contact with into fast-zombie-like mutants. A short time after opening the staff has to close shop again when infected customers start attacking people. So it turns into a zombie siege movie with the staff having to fend off a (very modest) alien invasion.

 All good, and some of the fundamentals are in place: the practical effects range from cheesy to pretty respectable (the late-stage mutation aliens have a pretty nifty EC comics look). The extremely low budget means that they're very inconsistent, though, and save for... well, one, most of the kills are pretty mundane and non-gory.
 The bigger problem with the scarce funding is that all sorts of filler needs to be added - and instead of providing events for the cast to react to, they go for character development; The script (by Andy Greskoviak) is not nearly up to that.
 There's a couple of disposable characters that are so cartoony they're painful to watch (an old lady who keeps saying inappropriate stuff! A couple of corporate suckups!), but the main characters don't really fare that much better. There's a couple of interesting ideas in there - the deconstruction of Sawa's attempts to be the big fish in a little pond with his too-cool-for-school attitude, for example - but mostly it's just tiresome, clichéd, unfunny shit. It comes off as an attempt to look like it's saying something about people stuck in retail jobs rather than any sort of actual commentary.

 The cast is game, with Jai White coming out on top simply because he gets the least amount of characterization, no corny attempts at fleshing him out; Just a variation of his usual hyper-competent persona. Campbell is obviously having fun with his scumbag, avuncular store manager, and Baquero and Sawa come across as likeable at least some of the time.
 But you can only do so much when the script requires you to reveal (very shallow) hidden depths and have sub-Breakfast-Club heart-to-hearts not two minutes after someone's been brutally butchered in the same room.

 So we've got character drama with laughable characters, comedy with next to no laughs, and inconsistent, spotty action/horror business. Director Casey Tebo does what he can with the little money left over after FX and casting - things look professional enough, and there are a couple of good scenes - but as a whole it's too stop-start to work properly; At best it's disposable entertainment with too much dead time in its hands and some insufferable characters.