Movie Review: THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 9th, 2023 / 01:45 AM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Laya DeLeon Hayes, Denzel Whitaker, Chad L. Coleman, Reilly Brooke Stith, Keith Holliday, Amani Summer, Edem Atsu-Swanzy, Ellis Hobbs IV, Dale Cordice Jr., Jeremy DeCarlos, Beth Felice, Tracie Frank
Writer: Bomani J. Story
Director: Bomani J. Story
Distributor: RLJE Films/Shudder/Allblk
Release Date: June 9, 2023 (theatrical); June 23, 2023 (digital)

There is a lot of mostly good metaphor in THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER. It also works as a fairly straight Frankenstein tale.

The main question here might be with the title. Our protagonist, Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is indeed angry, but so is her friend and neighbor Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith).

So, which one of them is “the” angry black girl? The difference between these two young women is that Aisha is pregnant with the baby of Vicaria’s older brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), and trying to get her little sister Jada (Amani Summer) to read the writings of Malcolm X.

Vicaria (pronounced VAH-caria, not Vi-CAR-ia, as she exasperatedly corrects a teacher) is more interested in the healing potential of science. At the outset, she whispers to us, “Death is a disease.”

When Vicaria was eight, her mother was shot to death while holding her. When she’s in high school, Vicaria’s brother Chris is also gunned down, and this time, she is not going to take it.

As she tells us, Vicaria’s hypothesis is, “If death is a disease, then there’s a cure.”

When Jada calls her a “mad scientist,” it’s hard to tell if Vicaria is perturbed because she’s worried that somebody might suspect what she’s doing, or if she’s just irked because she doesn’t think there’s anything crazy about it.

Yes, Vicaria is the neighborhood “body snatcher” everyone is afraid of, but it’s all in a good cause. She is capable of putting up a solid argument in defense of her theories, but she’d rather be putting them into practice.

Vicaria is rapturous when dealing with viscera, joyous when she can get electricity to move rotting flesh. In what seems like a fairly brief amount of screen time, she brings brother Chris back from the dead.

However, Vicaria isn’t prepared for what she ought to do now that her experiment has succeeded. On the one hand, there’s an argument that she ought to be – her notebook is even titled “The Modern Prometheus” by Vicaria F.

Then again, Vicaria is still very young and without anybody to provide counsel. She is also focused on her plan to save her and Chris’s hardworking father Donald (Chad L. Coleman). Donald has relapsed into drug addiction after losing his son, and Vicaria wants this to stop before she has to resurrect her father, too.

Hayes makes Vicaria a magnetic central figure. She shows us the intelligence and authority that makes Vicaria someone that people around her turn to when they need her skills, and has the emotional depth to make us care about what she’s doing and what happens to her.

Coleman is the epitome of a loving father, and Denzel Whitaker has the right mixture of bravado and introspection as the local drug boss.

Writer/director Bomani J. Story knows how to make points, as well as deliver effective jump scares. There are credible analogues for topics ranging from the film’s main fulcrum – how gun violence is creating monsters in the Black community – to smaller ones like the importance of supportive parents, and the dangers of putting too much pressure on people who are mentally vulnerable.

Story also provides us with a sense of the wider community surrounding Vicaria and Chris. This allows for new plot twists, along with making us just about believe that Vicaria might be able to keep her activities from being noticed for as long as she does.

Where THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER slows down a bit is, oddly, where the pace speeds up. As it becomes a more traditional horror movie, we get fewer of the elements that have made it unique. We also get just a little impatient with Vicaria. We like her a great deal and have sympathy for her, but when a character starts sliding into predictable tropes, we lose our sense of urgency.

Still, there’s plenty in THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MOTHER for both fans of Frankenstein’s monster stories and people who enjoy pairing horror conventions with societal observations.

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