Bad Hair

Bad Hair

The only good thing I can say about “Bad Hair,” Justin Simien’s horror satire about Black hair, is that it made me want to put a killer weave on my head. I’d look like Thulsa Doom from “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), but I’m okay with that. I’ve always wanted to shimmy my hair like Cab Calloway. Plus, I have scores to settle. Creature feature horror is one of my favorite genres and I measure them by whether or not I’d want to own the monster.

In that regard, this movie wins: The killer coif is pretty cool visually though it eventually doesn’t play by its own rules and it thrives on blood from any source, killing anything in its path to get it. Like “The Blob,” it has the ability to reshape itself as it stalks prey. It also makes its owner Anna Bludso’s (Elle Lorraine) eyes glow while giving her flashbacks that look like a Kwanzaa greeting card.

Where “Bad Hair” falters is in reckoning with the hornet’s nest it kicks regarding its subject matter. At nearly two hours long, Simien has time to interrogate the natural vs processed hair argument instead of just alluding to it occasionally throughout his film. Spike Lee created such a dialogue in slightly over six minutes during “School Daze’s” “Straight and Nappy” number; that film was released 12 months before Bad Hair takes place.

This lack of focus on such a controversial issue speaks more toward biting off more than can be chewed in a screenplay than anything else. We also have workplace sexism, racial micro- and macro-aggressions, gentrification, media catering towards white audiences and that’s just for satire! On horror we’ve got witches, folktales slavery ultra perms gone bad. The latter works out better even if it never fulfills its promise of offering Vanessa Williams’ weave-based Verzuz battle

Williams plays Zora, the new head of Culture TV, an MTV-ish channel in mid-pivot due to falling ratings. Zora with the “good hair” is replacing Anna’s old boss, Edna (Judith Scott). It’s implied that Edna’s reign was too Afrocentric, evidenced by the addition of Grant Madison (James van der Beek), a White man with ideas that will supposedly save the network. I was confused about Anna’s job.

Was she even being paid by Edna for all her years of work? Her father Amos (Blair Underwood in a jarring grey beard) refers to his daughter’s job as an internship and Anna can barely pay her rent. Anna’s big dreams are to be a VJ, though the station already has its quota of one Black onscreen celebrity with natural hair, Sista Soul (Yaani King Mondschein). Anyone else whose hair is less than Dark ‘n Lovely is faced with unemployment. The most ominous moment in “Bad Hair” may be when Zora asks Anna “who does your hair?”

It’s a rare time anyone discusses hair in this movie, which is a problem because we never get a feel for what the women’s hair choices meant to them. Anna thinks straight hair will get her the coveted position, but why a weave? Simien offers a flashback of a traumatic experience Anna had with a no-lye relaxer that left her with permanent scarring.

My aunt used to say they called it a no-lye relaxer because “it burned the hell out of your scalp and that’s no lie.” Still, it’s easier and cheaper than a weave. “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.

Zora recommends a beauty salon run by Virgie (Laverne Cox). After Anna begs for an appointment, Virgie fits her in as her last customer. “Are you tender headed?” asks Virgie, leaning on the word so hard that my now bald kitchen had sense memories of my mother’s comb yanking itself through my hair. What follows is a gory scene of the killer weave being sewn into Anna’s hair. It’s ridiculously over the top, with a memorably sinister Cox and a suffering Lorraine cementing the scene’s effectiveness. All subsequent attacks by the monster are pitched at this level as well, which adds to fun.

Simien populates this film with so many extra characters that it feels like it would make for better television than film specifically sitcoms or serials rather than movies or miniseries where every character only gets two lines before disappearing forever into obscurity without ever having been given proper backstories themselves let alone meaningful arcs throughout their respective narratives.

It takes almost an hour for the first victim of the weave to claim its life, though Anna is given quite a warning about what’s going to happen. I have way too many questions regardless of how much I enjoyed watching people get murdered. Movies like this need to hurry up and not let us think about all the things that make no sense in them, and I don’t mean any of the horror stuff.

Spike Lee would’ve done better with this material by confronting directly and uncomfortably his subject or ignoring it completely in favor of pure grindhouse tactics as he does in “Bamboozled.” Bad Hair doesn’t work because it plays coy with what good hair means to who owns it like Jordan Peele got out relevant Black experience wrung from Get Out. The furry monster saves the movie but misses by a hair.

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