Honourable Mention: Meet the Blacks

Directed by Deon Taylor this was a 2016 horror spoof and it came onto my radar as the sequel, The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2, is a vampire-based film. I thought it was probably useful, whilst waiting for its home release, to watch the original. As I was aware that this film spoofs The Purge, I have to admit I wasn’t foreseeing writing an article for the blog.

Then as the film opened, we get an illustrated sequence explaining the backstory – which is basically that Carl Black (Mike Epps) was a shady electrician who ran a wiring firm when his friend, and drug dealer, Key Flo (Charlie Murphy) is arrested and Carl acquires his drugs stash and money. Believing that Key Flo is essentially going to be in jail for life, Carl buys a Beverley Hills mansion and moves his family out of Chicago.

opening illustration

As the sequence went on, we see Carl’s son, Carl Jr (Alex Henderson), with fangs. It turns out that Carl Jr acts like he is a vampire. Through the film he wears a cloak and we see him with fake fangs, and at one point he is called Blacula. And for this dressing up and pretending he is a vampire the film gets an honourable mention. Meanwhile the film spoofs the first Purge movie, with Carl believing they don’t Purge in Beverley Hills, especially in gated communities, his neighbours actively seeking to Purge the new black neighbours, Key Flo out of jail and a variety of people Carl has wronged looking for revenge Purge style.

fake fangs

Comedy-wise I wasn’t particularly sure – the using the institutionalised racism and white privilege that seems to underpin US society as a source of comedy may have worked really well – but making Carl the actual stereotype that is born of that institutionalised bigotry undermined the joke and, amidst a general slew of stereotypes, made it somewhat uncomfortable. There were bits that might have been drawn into a much more nuanced comedy – I really liked the idea of a credit card company sending an agent out into the Purge to deal with bad customers. Whether, having done this movie, the filmmakers can nuance more to make a clever vampire comedy in the sequel we will have to see (a sequel is suggested in this, by the way, but the direction was laid out as Friday the 13th).

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK