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It’s then when Bad Hair goes full horror mode and Die Hard-esque as she tries to survive all the crazy hair after her. Anna kills her own weave when she trips the office's smoke alarm and water destroys it as she cuts it all off at the same time. There’s also a subplot that feels half-baked right down to the final twist, with folkloric references stretching back to slave days, when a “house negress” became enchanted with the filigreed greenery from Spanish moss trees, using it to make a wig.
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The supernatural elements of that story do feed the main narrative, however, and as Anna’s hair starts exerting its own demonic power, she becomes increasingly torn over whether to capitalize on her new self-assurance or break free from its disturbing spell. It takes almost an hour before the weave claims its first victim, though it provides Anna with more than a little warning of its impending intentions. As much as I enjoyed the murderous shenanigans, I’m still left with far too many questions. Movies like this need to move fast enough for us to not focus on its implausible elements, and I don’t mean any of the horror stuff. This material would have worked better either by directly and uncomfortably confronting the subject it’s satirizing, like Spike Lee does in “Bamboozled,” or by completely bypassing the message altogether in favor of pure grindhouse tactics. By playing coy with what the notion of good and bad hair means to its owners, “Bad Hair” fails at the kind of Black experience-related relevance Jordan Peele wrung out of “Get Out.” The hirsute creature almost saves the movie, but it misses by a hair.
Bad Hair Day: Where to Watch & Stream Online - ComingSoon.net
Bad Hair Day: Where to Watch & Stream Online.
Posted: Wed, 06 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
‘Bad Hair’: Film Review Sundance 2020
Anna recalls an African American slave lore tale called "The Moss Haired Girl" from a book given to her by her uncle, a Black studies professor. A slave fashions a wig from tree moss to replicate the straight hair of her masters, but finds the moss is actually the hair of dead witches who possess the woman. Frantic, Anna finds that Zora and others who received weaves from Virgie's are possessed. Zora attempts to break free from the possession and is killed by her own hair.
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Even once the new-look Anna starts flipping her long locks with confidence — albeit also with agonizing pain — the action remains sluggish. Cut to 1989, when the victim of that home-haircare mishap, Anna (appealing newcomer Elle Lorraine), has been toiling as an assistant to EVP of programming Edna (Judith Scott) at Culture network for four years, hoping for a promotion. But when corporate overseer Grant Madison (James Van Der Beek) declares that new blood is needed to turn around the division, he ushers in famed black supermodel Zora (Vanessa Williams) as chief, and jobs are suddenly on the line. Bad Hair had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2020.
When her drunk landlord, Mr. Tannen, attempts to rape her, Anna's hair becomes active and stabs him. At a party, Zora asks cryptic questions about whether Anna is still using the hair product, leading her to suspect that Zora is similarly afflicted. She is confronted by Edna, who is disappointed by Anna selling out Culture's image and criticizes her weave as indicative of her lack of integrity.
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Find a list of new movie and TV releases on DVD and Blu-ray (updated weekly) as well as a calendar of upcoming releases on home video. Find release dates for every movie coming to theaters, VOD, and streaming throughout 2024 and beyond, updated weekly. But Bad Hair works best when it moves away from its fairly basic social commentary and goes for broke with batshit craziness when the greater purpose of Virgie’s transformed clients is revealed. Led by Williams’ gloriously witchy Zora in snake-eyed Medusa mode, the weave women raise hell to protect their own, with the carnage growing progressively more outlandish as the lustrous manes become lethal weapons. By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes. By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies, and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands.
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The genre’s conventions — mythologies must be revealed and bloodlust sated — allow Simien to take aim at racism cinematically and without didacticism. As a result, his dialogue and style in “Bad Hair” are less fussy than in his previous work. Like Anna’s demon weave, Simien’s social critique gathers vitality from the gore.
In surprise leadership shakeup, Sundance Institute CEO steps down after 2.5 years
However, her flourishing career may come at a great cost when she realizes that her new hair may have a mind of its own.In 1989 an ambitious young woman gets a weave in order to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television. This reading of The Moss Haired Girl is followed up by Linda saying that she’s going to go to Virgie’s salon because she’s annoyed by her natural hair. ” Bad Hair is using its folktale concept to explore the expectations on Black women to forfeit their own roots for someone else's. Everything in Bad Hair is based on its own legend deriving from The Moss Haired Girl, a fictional folktale about a Black slave which acts as a guidebook for Anna’s experiences with their supernatural weaves. We learn that they have been given “hair of witches from the before time” and according to the story, the hair needs blood to “grow strong enough to take over a person’s body.” Hence all that terrifying bleeding when Anna was getting her hair done. Once it murders people, it absorbs their blood to continue thriving and possessing Anna’s body when it wants to.
How The Moss-Haired Girl Legend Ends
"British guy, cool rider, motorcycles. I like the songs and the plot is actually fun. The original is a classic but this one is actually great." Down the hallway, his “Dear White People” writers worked away on an episode for the show’s fourth and final season. Across the building stood stages where the fictional Winchester University comes to life when the show is filming.
Likewise, a VJ character named Julius (Jay Pharoah), who dumps Anna for Zora and then more or less disappears. "Abduction with Taylor Lautner also gets SO much hate (and probably rightfully so) but I’ve watched that movie a decent amount times. I even bought the DVD so I could watch it whenever it left the streaming apps." "The plot definitely could have been better, given the potential of the film, but it was still entertaining. I think the cast being so good had it hyped too high, but it still delivers as a decent superhero film. Very far from being one of the worst super hero films." In the second half of Bad Hair, Anna ends up in a nasty confrontation with her landlord Mr. Tannen, that could have been a rape, but her hair defends itself and kills him (yep, that happened). Anna's weave also takes over during her steamy night with Jay Pharaoh's Julius, which turns into a bloody murder too.
He wanted to weave the legacy of internalized beauty standards into “Bad Hair” along with elements of African American folklore and his own observations about the costs of success in America. Two days before heading to Sundance, where “Dear White People” launched his career, Simien took a break in his office in the Sun Valley studio that’s home to the spinoff series he writes, directs and executive produces. The month ahead will bring new films from Alex Garland, Luca Guadagnino, Dev Patel, and more. To help you plan your moviegoing options, our editors have selected the most notable films releasing in April 2024, listed in alphabetical order. We rank every one of the British director's movies by Metascore, from his debut Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels to his brand new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
“Bad Hair” spends more plot time dealing with trifling-ass men like Anna’s thieving ex-boyfriend, Julius (Jay Pharaoh) than any of the female relationships that might shine a light on the hair-related issues. Terrified, Anna flees to a natural hair salon to have the weave removed and runs into Edna. She tearfully apologizes for disappointing her, but as the stylist attempts to cut her weave out, the hair kills everyone in the salon.
However, her flourishing career may come at a great cost when she realizes that her new hair may have a mind of its own. While it’s more in line with the freewheeling, absurdist comedy of Sorry to Bother You than the elevated horror of Jordan Peele’s films, Bad Hair falls not entirely comfortably between those two poles and is at its best when all-out campy B-movie mayhem takes hold. Where “Bad Hair” is not so successful, however, is in reckoning with the hornet’s nest it kicks regarding its subject matter.
At almost two hours, Simien has time to interrogate the natural vs. processed hair argument instead of only hinting at it occasionally. It took Spike Lee just over six minutes to create such a dialogue in the “Straight and Nappy” number in “School Daze.” That film came out in 1988, one year before “Bad Hair” takes place. The lack of focus on this controversial issue is more a product of the screenplay biting off more than it can chew. We also have to deal with workplace sexism, racial micro- and macroaggressions, gentrification, the media’s need to catering to a White audience—and that’s just on the satire side. On the horror side, we’ve got witches, folktales, slavery and UltraPerms gone bad. The horror side works out better, even if it doesn’t live up to its promise of a weave-based Verzuz battle featuring Vanessa Williams.
There seems to be a big operation at work here that keeps these witches alive in the spirit of others. Bad Hair is one of the most unique and truly hair-raising films of the season. The Hulu film has Dear White People creator Justin Simien delivering his first horror movie... If you’ve made it here, you watched the Bad Hair ending and are looking to comb out the split ends. And truth be told, the ‘80s set horror-comedy definitely has a lot of WTF moments that may not wrap around your head upon first viewing. Summary In 1989 an ambitious young woman gets a weave in order to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television.
In the late 1970s, a young Anna attempts to relax her hair with the help of her older cousin Linda. Her hair has a bad reaction to the cream and leaves a permanent scar at the back of her head.
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