Bitch Ass, 2022.
Co-written and directed by Bill Posley.
Starring Sheaun McKinney, Tunde Laleye, Me’Lisa Sellers, Teon Kelly, and Tony Todd.
SYNOPSIS:
A gang initiation goes wrong when a group of four recruits break into a house of horror, as they’re all forced to play deadly games for their lives. Win and you live – lose and you die.
An in-the-hood take on Don’t Breathe by way of Saw and the board game Mouse Trap offers one hell of a hook for Bill Posley’s feature debut Bitch Ass, yet this low-fi horror romp only occasionally grasps the gonzo potential of its setup.
In 1999, a group of young initiates in the 6th Street gang are tasked with breaking into a house and robbing it in order to earn their stripes. However, they’re unaware that the house belongs to Bitch Ass, or rather Cecil (Tunde Laleye), a board-game obsessed oddball who was bullied and brutally beaten by the 6th Street gang almost 20 years prior.
And so, a vengeful Bitch Ass takes this opportunity to subject these unfortunate home invaders to the “game” he’s been busy building; a grisly series of challenges based on childhood board games we all know and love, where the cost of losing is to forfeit one’s life in brutal fashion.
Again, a neat concept for a ridiculous comedy-horror flick, and one that at least begins promisingly enough with a brief opening introduction from the great Tony Todd, who outlines the history of Black hood horror, best defined of course by Todd’s own Candyman. And though Bitch Ass might hope to make its title murderer – dubbed “the first Black serial killer to ever don a mask” – into an iconic genre staple, it sadly falls massively short of that mark.
The biggest problem? Bitch Ass simply doesn’t make the most of its straight-forward concept, eschewing creative gore in favour of bloated backstory and a fairly scant amount of screen time for the killer himself.
The five featured games are the easy highlight, with fucked-up iterations of Operation, Connect 4, Jenga, and other classic games on offer. That said, there’s disappointingly little creativity to these torturous re-imaginings of best-selling board games, and again a lack of memorable gore which one can only assume is a result of budgetary constraints.
And that thrown-together production frequently draws attention to itself throughout, to occasionally charming effect – as though a project enthusiastically assembled on a shoestring budget by friends – but often just smacking of missed opportunity. An attempt is made to visualise Bitch Ass’ sick game by way of Cluedo-style CGI titles for each of the rooms in his house, though these titles are often poorly tracked onto the surrounding environment and noticeably jitter around.
Posley also makes the somewhat strange decision to present most of the film in an ultra-wide aspect ratio, save for the full-screen Tony Todd wraparound segments and occasional asides where the screen splits off into comic book-style panels.
The script clearly comes secondary to the horror-show set-pieces, with an excess of uninteresting melodrama involving both the new 6th Street recruits and Bitch Ass himself, the latter’s tragic backstory doled out through several languorous, overlong flashbacks. A film clocking in at just 83 minutes shouldn’t feel quite so much of a chore to finish.
And so, Bitch Ass runs out of what little steam it had long before the end, ensuring that as Black horror icons go, it falls far short of the classics it invokes at the beginning. Very occasionally amusing and mercifully short, the worst thing that can be said about Bitch Ass is that it’s pretty dull.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
