Black as Night is a new Amazon Prime vampire flick produced by Blumhouse pictures. I’m guessing this is a continuation of 2020s random horror movies that got put directly into Prime. And I’m not surprised it didn’t go theatrical.

The film follows a young black teenage girl living in post-Katrina New Orleans. One fateful night she’s set upon by a (homeless) vampire. Surviving the attack, she and a few friends have to face the vampire scourge that is praying on the poor, the destitute, and the crackheads. As she says, “the Summer I got breasts is the summer I fought vampires”. True that.

This movie shares some DNA with the recent Candyman, interestingly enough. It’s focused on the plight of the poor black community living in the floodplain of New Orleans… on race riots, gentrification, and other ills perpetrated on the poor. It’s pretty up-front about its political message and, by the end, it ties in well enough to the vampire storyline.

Overall though this is a movie that almost gets there as far as a horror movies go. It’s not particularly scary and, in fact, there’s enough humorous bits that I sometimes wondered if this might have had more connective tissue with The Lost Boys than Candyman. But it’s not goofy or cool or crazy enough.

It feels like a very short movie even though it runs a solid, requisite ninety. There just isn’t much story and then it’s largely done. Unfortunately there’s a strange turn in the last act and we get some “I think they cut something for time” exposition that comes out of nowhere and kind of goes nowhere. It’s the start of a slide for the movie that was, up to that point, decently entertaining. It didn’t kill the movie but it sure didn’t help it.

Overall, this isn’t a bad watch as long as you go in knowing its pretty limited in scope and story. If you are interested in another political take in the form of genre horror, it might be a curiosity worth checking out. I’ve surely seen worse.

Score: 74