‘Black as Night’: Cliches bite in this vampire tale – Newsday

THE MOVIE "Black as Night"

WHERE Now streaming on Amazon

WHAT IT'S ABOUT One of the new films in the "Welcome to the Blumhouse" horror anthology series, "Black as Night" tells the story of teenage Shawna (Asjha Cooper) as she fights a burgeoning vampire army during a New Orleans summer.

Joining her are best friend Pedro (Fabrizio Guido), her crush Chris (Mason Beauchamp) and new pal Grania (Abbie Gayle), an authority in teen vampire fiction.

The movie is directed by Maritte Lee Go, written by Sherman Payne ("Charm City Kings") and streaming now on Amazon Prime. It's one-fourth of the "Welcome to the Blumhouse" slate for the streamer from the prolific horror production company for 2021, alongside "Bingo Hell," "The Manor" and "Madres."

MY SAY In the best scene in "Black as Night," Shawna's father Steven (Derek Roberts) brings her to an empty lot. The protagonist has lost her mother, first to drug addiction and then when bitten by a vampire and killed by the daylight.

At this lot, a home once stood, before being destroyed as part of the tragedy Hurricane Katrina wrought on the city. "History matters," Steven says. "It was so chaotic after Katrina, the help she needed, just wasn't there. And it never came."

Thoughtful and underplayed, the scene finds the exact right tone in a movie that makes a point of tying Shawna's personal crisis and the vampiric scourge setting in on the city into a larger historical framework.

But it's also an anomaly in what too often otherwise comes across as a run-of-the-mill genre picture, without the confidence to see these larger ideas through. The routine plotting and one-dimensional characters stand in direct opposition to the more interesting touches.

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Fans of the Blumhouse anthology will surely find themselves satisfied; this is a polished production that offers up exactly what you'd expect from a present-day vampire picture.

But a movie that's smart enough to incorporate an impressionistic animated montage offering a centuries-spanning history of the presence of vampires in New Orleans ought to do better than surrounding it with halfhearted scenes of characters gathering garlic and stakes before setting off on a hunt, and so many other cliches.

The actors don't get the opportunity to really build out these characters or to explore the coming-of-age touches in Shawna's story because Payne's screenplay has to hit the requisite marks. The movie cries out for more scenes that allow the viewer to be immersed in this potent cinematic universe, to understand the ways in which Shawna's fight against the vampires mirrors her own growth as a person in this city facing rampant inequities.

The requirements of its formulaic structure won't allow for them, so "Black as Night" plays as less of its own unique production with something thoughtful to add to the lineage of vampire pictures, and more like a pedestrian Anne Rice adaptation.

BOTTOM LINE "Black as Night" has its share of scares and a thoughtful presentation of its New Orleans setting, but it's also rife with cliches.

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'Black as Night': Cliches bite in this vampire tale - Newsday