Eleventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Bad Hair

 Happy Halloween, everyone!  This was not my most prolific month for watching scary movies - that honor goes to 2018 when I watched twenty-two! - but 2020 has been enough of a horror show anyway.  The final* October movie is Bad Hair, a brand new "horror satire" available for streaming on Hulu.  I'm not entirely sure that it works as satire because it doesn't really go far enough to criticize anything; that is the biggest problem, I think, I just wanted MORE.

The plot is set in 1989, Los Angeles, with our protagonist Anna working for an MTV-esque shownetwork featuring urban (read: black) music.  When a new boss moves in, Anna feels pressure to look the part more, especially since she really wants to host her own show.  Her natural hairstyle is looked down on and so she finagles an appointment at the coolest salon in town to get a weave.  The new hair - sleek, shiny and straight - opens doors both professionally and personally ... until the weave shows that it has a mind of its own, forcing Anna into situations where it can feed on its victim's blood.  Turns out that the hair came from witches from old slave lore and the witches are looking to take over bodies for themselves.

There are absolutely some ick-tastic scenes here.  I had no idea what the process for getting a sewn-in weave was and even if you leave out the piercing needles and possessed hair, it still looks excruciating.  It is horrifying to see what WOC have been forced/encouraged to do to their hair, whether chemical straightening or these painful weaves, to be accepted.

Other than the bits of body horror, however, this is a fairly tame flick.  Because it's POSSESSED HAIR, there's an awful lot of terrible CGI and the killings are pretty meh.  The costumes look like someone did a deep dive into a Goodwill and don't seem to match what the late 80's MTV generation would have been wearing.  Where this movie truly excels is in its casting, though: Laverne Cox, Vanessa Williams, Lena Waithe, Usher, Kelly Rowland, Blair Underwood (and James Vanderbeek)!  That's a heavy hitting roster for a lightweight movie.

*  I do have a DVD of the original The Crazies headed my way, so we'll tack that on as an extra added bonus.