An adventure of misfit friends and laughs in a twisted yet creative context, The Blackening is what I would call killer funny. The film keeps its audience on edge and its laughs are well timed. It’s quirky but in a good way. Almost each word or scenario in the film is full of wit and giggles. And the setup of The Blackening is horror meets comedy at its finest.

The Blackening gears on seven Black friends who are on a weekend getaway at a cabin in the woods. They are Lisa (played by Antoinette Robertson), Dewayne (played by Dewayne Perkins), Nhamdi (played by Sinqua Walls), Allison (played by Grace Byers) Shanka (played by X Mayo), King (played by Melvin Gregg), and Clifton (played by Jermaine Fowler). A group of diverse people with all kinds of strange humor and often poor judgment, the friends’ vacation is going just fine until they come across a board game called The Blackening. The skill to keep themselves alive and survive this deadly board game is their knowledge of horror movies. That’s the key to making it out of the game alive.

The friends in The Blackening come together to fight for survival, but they aren’t that serious and neither is the film. The friends’ knowledge of horror films leads to all kinds of stereotypes and arguments, and many of the arguments distracts them from the main goal of staying alive. This is where The Blackening finds its genius track. Many of the friends are smart and some not so much, so the dialogue between them becomes offensive at times, but still consistently hysterical. The terror is even hilarious. The Blackening is slapstick at its finest.

The film’s dialogue is where I was sold. Though fighting for their life to survive in the cabin of horrors, the characters also question each other’s beliefs and political backgrounds. This dialogue had me dying laughing—especially when they would get off the subject of figuring out how best to survive. One of the character even admits to voting for Donald Trump. The Blackening will enthrall its audience with its humanistic and realistic humor in a quirky game adventure of a comedy.

To me, The Blackening was almost like the film Jumanji crossed with the television series In Living Color. The board game theme is of course where the Jumanjireference comes in, and the tone of the humor and the personalities and backgrounds of many of the characters was similar to In Living Color. But the terror obviously sets it apart. And the approach work quite well. The Blackening is simply the most creative and superb ensemble cast I have seen in a long time.

I will say that some may find the film offensive at times, but I didn’t find it that way at all. The Blackening starts with a creative concept, it all works very well, and the outcomes are genius. I could not get enough of the joy of The Blackening. Three and a half stars out of four stars for this superb slapstick horror comedy.