Fifty Shades Of Black

No stars for the obvious title but it does give one a taste of what to expect here: a silly but occasionally funny scene-by-scene parody of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

I’m in a bind though, not having seen Grey, which by all accounts is a parody of itself. Can the jokes exist outside the original movie?

Not having experienced South Central by the time I saw Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood, the best comedy involving a Wayans (yes, that includes Scary Movie 1-23), didn’t stop me enjoying that. Do you really need to see Airport to enjoy Airplane, or Top Gun to get a few laughs out of Hot Shots?

Hannah (a game Kali Hawk, Couples Retreat) is a mousy college student employed to interview the mysterious Christian Black (Wayans), a powerful businessman who, he says, made his money the way all black men do: selling crack. They embark on a master-servant sexual relationship with all kinds of kinky toys and sadomasochist scenarios explored. But will the two, after the whips and clamps are put away, realise they love each other?

While Marlon Wayans’s brand of comedy is very hit and miss I’d gladly watch one hundred of their parodies over the nonsense their rivals, Messrs Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, serve up. The reason? Plot and character. These things may not be important to the prolific Wayans, who also writes here, as say Charlie Kauffman, but he values narrative development a hell of a lot more than the Epic Movie and Disaster Movie directors, who are just content to blunderbuss any and all pop culture reference of the previous six months onto the screen. Wayans’s determination to take an audience on a journey, however loose the definition of that is here, instead of firing off standalone jokes ensures his comedies are at the least watchable.

He’s also trying his level best to make you laugh with every line, using the Fifty Shades framework to slip in pointed comments of sexism, misogyny and an audience’s delight in watching human suffering. While chunks of screentime can go by without garnering a chuckle (the easier jokes about small penises, hairy legs, big dildos, etc), Wayans’s efforts guarantee there’s something around the corner that will. Jane Seymour as Wayans’s racist mother was an inspired stroke, the Whiplash/The Graduate mash-up gag (yes, it is possible to combine the two), the locksmith conundrum, and the elevator sex scene are a hoot. Wayans and Hawk look like they’re having a blast throughout too. It’s so daft and so unselfconscious there’s something endearing about it. It can be crude too – that 18 rating isn’t for nothing.

While Fifty Shades Of Black will obviously work better for an audience who have seen …Grey, it does stand on its own two feet. Let’s hope the next Friedberg/Seltzer collaboration, the Taken parody Who The F**k Took My Daughter?, does the same.