Bad Hair really needs a loud, live audience, preferably around midnight, to reach its full potential. But it’s a fun, guffaw-producing horror comedy even without that. Writer-director Justin Simien (Dear White People) jumps into the hotly contested conversation on cultural hair care with this story of Anna (Elle Lorraine), an assistant at a cable music channel circa 1989 who dreams of a career as a VJ. When her new boss (Vanessa Williams) encourages her to trade in her natural look for a smooth, sweeping weave (“My girls need to flow … freely” she purrs), Anna’s career prospects quickly improve. Yet the weave, with its inky, reaching tendrils, seems to have a bloodthirsty mind of its own. In terms of tone, Bad Hair is probably best compared to Little Shop of Horrors, even if the “feeding” scenes are far gorier than those involving Audrey II. We even get a full-blown production number thanks to a very 1990s music video, in which Kelly Rowland plays a hip-hop star in the mold of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. As Anna, Lorraine nicely balances the character’s inner conflict with her outer horror, while Simien has fun with some extreme camera angles, insidious slow zooms, and a truly creepy sequence in a salon’s hall of hair samples. (Laverne Cox plays the witch-like, um, weaver.) While Simien makes sure to have a woman at one point say, “In a perfect world, a woman would be able to wear her hair the f*** the way she wants to,” Bad Hair’s premise and plot (not to mention its title) are inherently in favor of natural curl. Also featuring funny turns from Jay Pharoah, Lena Waithe, James Van Der Beek (doing his best Don Johnson), and—in a hilarious three-second cameo—Nicole Byer of Netflix’s Nailed It!