Final Girl - 2015, d. Tyler Shields -- the movie network
All original content here for G&DSD, as I can't remember exactly when I watched these and thus logging them into Letterboxd is a bit of a cheat. Plus, I watched them both before I was on Letterboxd. I know this because I watched them both on the same day, back-to-back, in a weird fit of day-off-at-home experimentation (much) earlier this year.
It is very curious (and I'm assuming rare) for two films to come out in the same year with extremely similar titles, in effect referencing the same horror movie trope. Doubly curious is that they both share a prominent cast member in actor Alexander Ludwig...we're talking a significant role in both movies. And yet, that's pretty much where the similarities end. One is a PG-13, fun and fanciful, bloodless homage to 80's horror tropes, while the other is more of a dumbass action-suspense that's so stupid dumb and pains me to admit I even watched it.
 |
| The Good One |
The Final Girls, with the "the" article and pluralization, is a playful film in which the daughter (Tessa Farmiga) of a former scream queen (Malin Akerman) who tragically died in real life gets sucked into her mother's famous slasher movie alongside a few friend who coax her to the screening at a horror filmfest. The film toys with the idea that living inside a film means so much is fixed. The characters can only traverse within the confines of a scene. If they wish to leave the scene they have to move through it as the characters would do. It also plays with the logic of trying to manipulate events that are supposed to happen repeatedly, such that no matter what you do, you can't change them. Max, upon meeting her mother's character in the film, seeks to connect with her, even though logically she knows it's not her.
The film obviously embraces and messes with horror conventions, but really exists more on the side of humour and fantasy rather than horror. The lighting, the framing, the score all undersell the idea that this is in anyway a true horror movie. Where it could easily have been a Scream-style copycat, self aware but full of jump-scares, it instead tries for its own path where there's virtually no tension outside of the personal angst of Max and what to do about her not-mom. It's a mostly fun deviation, but it felt just a little too small and a little too rough to have me earnestly enthused. The humour is somewhat stale and the script just doesn't have enough punch, it's a clever idea, but it needed more clever ideas piled on top of it to really sell it. The visuals are generally adequate but with one nice eyepopping side-scrolling fight scene at the end. With a little more investment into playing with film textures (ala Grindhouse) once they enter the movie, and goofing around with meta-text a bit more, it would had a little extra something. This movie should really look better and be funnier. I could see the Wet Hot American Summer team doing something like this and really molding it into a cult classic.
The Final Girls is worth a watch at least, if playing with horror tropes is your thing. It's infinitely better than Final Girl, which hurts my brain and makes me a little sick to my stomach when I think about it. It's not any gore or anything in the film that does it, but just the fact that it exists at all. Final Girl is easily one of the worst ideas for a movie and one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever experienced.
 |
| please, just don't even... |
The idea here is (and I'll try to recall with accuracy, but don't hold my feet to the fire because I would rather not think about it at all) there's this group of frat boys who take girls out on dates then murder them, but they're untouchable, somehow. So this maybe secret maybe government organization, or this guy from this organization, or just this guy... frick...ok, so Wes Bentley (what the hell are you doing in this movie Wes?) finds this young girl, and trains her to be a deadly weapon. Shades of Hanna here (ugh, I love Hanna, and it hurts me to even compare this excrement to it), but instead of staying a young girl, she becomes a "hot teen" (Abigail Breslin, looking like she's CGI enhanced into the uncanny valley, but she's not) who's tasked with going on a date with one of these guys and then killing the entire group of them.
Oh my god, my brain hurts with all of this. Like, how long have these frat boys been in the game if we see the girl as a little girl grow up into a hot teen? And why do they need to train a girl to date one of these guys in order to kill them? Bentley takes her right to their hangout, and we see the frat boys exit, so clearly Bentley's organization knows where they are and there's opportunity to take them out all the damn time. But instead they let these murderous a-holes keep killing girls FOR YEARS while they train a little girl to become a deadly hot teen? What the hell.
And not only have they trained Breslin in the arts of seriously killing a motherfucker, but also in the art of punchy repartee, which she shows in spades while chatting up her creepy, murderous date (that Alexander Ludwig guy who played the Shaggy character The Final Girls). They have their diner date and then he brings her out to the woods to "party" with his friends. They play a stupid truth or dare type game (may actually have been truth or dare, I'm not tracking this that closely), and they drug her. She wakes up restrained and they proceed to taunt and torment her, telling her all the awful things they're going to do to her, all the awful things they always do to girls, because they're huge fans of A Clockwork Orange or something. I don't know, don't care. Anyway, confession got, great, time to arrest them, because that's the whole point, right, catch them on tape and bring them to justice?
Nope. That would make sense. Breslin's been trained for this shit, she escapes her bindings and she flips the table, hunting these guys through the woods (woods with a weird-as-shit backlight source), one by one, setting up little traps and shit for them, until they're all dead and her mission is done.
Dear fucking Gob, this movie is stupid. Why does it exist? What purpose is there to it? It doesn't even play into the "final girl" horror movie trope at all! What is the point? Why that title? I hate that I spent any amount of time on this movie (I think I fast forwarded much of the second half), I hate that good actors had to be desperate enough for a paycheck to take part in this dumb, dumb, dumb movie, and I hate that more people may confuse this with a better movie called The Final Girls and accidentally watch this instead.
(David reviewed The Final Girls in his 31 Days of Halloween 2015)
No comments:
Post a Comment