“Bad Hair”: A promising career in music television gets truncated because of a hairdo

Maybe this year we are not getting many big horror productions on our screens, but we can’t complain about the generous amount of small but funny horror-comedies getting available these last weeks. Recently we have enjoyed the releases of Beast Mode (2020), Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), Yummy (2019), and Scare Me (2020), while waiting for Blumhouse’s promising hit Freaky (2020) coming out next month, and leaving aside Quentin Dupieux’s wonderful hoax Mandibules (2020). Now it’s the time for Bad Hair (2020).

The movie is set during the rise of New Jack Swing in 1989, where an ambitious young woman from Compton, L.A. aspires to become a VJ but is told she doesn’t have the right hair, the right face, or the right skin color to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television. She strikes a Faustian bargain with the new head of a music network who tells her to get a weave, but this new hairstyle turns out to be anything but easy to maintain.

Bad Hair (2020) has been written, directed, and produced by Justin Simien, an awards-winner filmmaker known for his successful debut feature drama-comedy Dear White People (2014). Zaria Kelley, Corinne Massiah, Elle Lorraine, Jay Pharoah, Moses Storm, Madeleine Byrne, James Van Der Beek, Ashley Blaine Featherson, Lena Waithe, Yaani King Mondschein, Judith Scott, and Vanessa Williams form the main cast.

Bad Hair (2020) had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2020, followed by the screening at Chicago International Film Festival, and it’s scheduled to be part of the Stockholm International Film Festival in November 2020. It was released in a limited release on October 16, 2020, by Neon, followed by digital streaming on Hulu on October 23, 2020. The film had received generally positive reviews from critics. Here you can watch its official trailer.