FrightFest review – Bitch Ass (2021)

My notes on Bitch Ass (2021) – out on digital platforms from Fright Fest Presents and Signature

Like Ti West’s The Roost, this opens with a horror host riffing on his own genre CV – there, Tom Noonan, here Tony Todd.  In academy ratio, with a stack of VHS tapes, Todd proclaims that this is Hood Horror Movie Nights and namechecks a bunch of films – Blacula, Bones, The People Under the Stairs, Tales from the Hood and, of course, Candyman – to establish that this is an African-American-themed grindhouse/video rental experience, promising to present the first black serial killer to put on a mask  … if anyone watched all of those Charles Band ‘urban’ horrors post The Horrible Dr Bones and knows different, bug director-writer Bill Posley, not me …  Todd even shows a retro-looking VHS cover for the film we’re about to see, and the camera closes in on a monitor which expands to fill the frame, though after that there are many splitscreen, widescreen, kalaidoscope, Rubik’s cube cut-ups with the picture.  Games and puzzles are a big theme, which slightly underlines the fact that some of the puzzle pieces – key scenes – seem to be missing.  It’s mostly set in 1999, with flashbacks to 1980, and would be classed as a Don’t Breathe ripoff if the home invaders get menaced schtick hadn’t featured in The People Under the Stairs.

It’s also a slasher film where the much-abused killer earns more sympathy than his victims (cf: Terror Train), who range from well-intentioned to all-out awful but still do dreadful things.  When Matt Murdock became a superhero, he adopted the cruel nickname stuck on him in childhood as his alias – though, as a cartoon pointed out, he’d be more likely to wind up called Dorkface than Daredevil.  Here, schlubby Cecil (Jarvis Denman Jr), cosetted and abused by his mad grandma (Sherri L. Walker), is called ‘Bitch Ass’ by the hood gang bullies who eventually cut him up for some infraction that didn’t quite make the final assembly of the film.  Now, he wears a mask and is a semi-vigilante, forcing crooks who hassle folk or invade his home to play gruesome, brutal, non-copyright-infringing versions of tabletop games like Operation (Surgery), Battleship (Mayday) and Jenga (Collapse).  On ‘666 Night’, four kids on a gang initiation invade Bitch Ass’s house – three get done in swiftly, so the rest of the film has to bring in character backstory involving basically decent Q (Teon Kelley) – who, remember, was still willing to rob some guy’s house – and his Mom (Me’lisa Sellers), who once was reasonably nice to Cecil only to lure him into an alley so her gangbanger BF’s minion could razorslash his face.  Said BF has grown up to be Spade (Sheaun McKinney), who ordered this initiation – perhaps out of spite for being dumped back in the day.  Yes, BA is a horror movie monster … but he’s been so ill-treated and his victims are all technically terrible people, so maybe he ought to be cut some slack.  Also, he plays fair – risking death or injury as much as the losers he torments.

Bitch Ass isn’t subtle and a lot of its inventiveness seems to be a cover for weaknesses, but it is lively.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.