7. “META” MILITIA: Be on the lookout for any one of an enemy squadron of self aware films operating in your area. Report if seen…

This film takes the 2018 short film of the same name by the comedy troupe 3Peat and makes an entire horror film around a Juneteenth weekend spent at a cabin in the woods. Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh) arrive first and find an old board game from the racist past that challenges them to trivia to the death. She’s shot with an arrow and he’s captured before the credits.

Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers) and Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) are the next to arrive, followed by King (Melvin Gregg), Lisa’s ex Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). And just like every 80s slasher, the town is full of dread, scarred up convenience store clerks and authority figures like Ranger White (Diedrich Bader) who get in the way of drugs and sex in the woods.

By the time the substances start working, the board game — The Blackening — is back on the table. The voice of the game’s mascot tells them that he has Morgan and if they want to see him alive, they must answer black pop culture questions. One about the black guest stars of Friends — Aisha Tyler, Gabrielle Union and Janet Hubert would be good answers — leads to Morgan being beaten.

Now, the game changes and claims that whoever is the least black will be killed. Well, Clifton did vote for Trump.

Directed by Tim Story and written by Parker and Tracy Oliver, I laughed out loud at a few moments in this movie and was pleased that it remains an actual slasher despite referencing how much its characters know about horror movies. I mean, the tagline is “We can’t all die first.”

From the cabin being referenced as looking a lot like the Sawyer house to the killers making the ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah noises like Jason, there’s even a scene where Morgan goes on and on about an episode of Dateline where a brother and sister kept their incest-bred kids under the stairs. Of course, that’s The People Under the Stairs. And if you love Scream, much less Scream 2, the killer asking if Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps survived is beyond movie geek referential.