Bitch Ass review – inventively cheesy horror romp

Cobra Kai’s Bill Posley tells the story of four kids sent to rob a spooky house only to find themselves playing gory games of Operation! Battleship and Rock Paper Scissors

Actor-writer-director Bill Posley (best known for his scripts for Cobra Kai) is clearly having a bit of fun with this cheap and (presumably intentionally) cheesy horror romp. An opening framing device has a purring Tony Todd introducing the story in the style of hosts like Alfred Hitchcock or, more recently, Guillermo del Toro, evoking the “’hood horror stories of old” like Blacula (1972), Bones (2001) and Candyman (1992) to set the stage for some Afrocentric scares. This film, he boasts, is the story of the first black serial killer to wear a mask, who goes by the name Bitch Ass.

Moving between a 1980 and late 1990s time frame that leaves plenty of room for sequels, Posley’s script posits a Black-majority neighbourhood in the Los Angeles area where low-level criminal kingpin Spade (Sheaun McKinney) runs a small gang of local kids, played by a gaggle of actors with distinctly patchy performance skills. Of the team, Q (Teon Kelley) is sort of the odd one out; he is less committed to a life of crime and secretly harbours ambitions to become a doctor, encouraged by his loving single parent mother Marsia (Me’lisa Sellers).