Review: The Final Girls

Dir. Todd Strauss-Schulson (2015)

Important side note: This is NOT to be confused with the movie Final Girl which came out the same year as The Final Girls and shares a male lead actor. Very weird.

The fabric of reality itself is toyed with when a group of movie nerds are sucked into a famous slasher movie. Their struggle to both escape the film in which they are trapped and to understand the rules by which they must follow to progress is actually a secondary plot-line to a surprisingly emotional core. Our lead character, Max, is in a personal hell as her late mother was the lead actress in the movie in which she and her friends are trapped. Not only must she escape, but she has to watch a younger version of her mother playing a different character attempt to escape the psycho-camp-killer as well. 

This all sounds kind of traumatic, but in practice it walks a fine line between hilarious and touching. As it is a send-up of the slasher genre, expect a lot of humor specifically tailored to those who’ve seen a good many slasher movies. Our hero and her mother are the most fleshed out of the characters and, while their bond is very skillfully handled, we never learn much about them or the rest of the characters to be honest. The acting is generally pretty good, the actors gamely embracing stereotypes of stereotypes for comedic value. Some of the actors embrace the silliness a bit too hard, pushing their performances from hilarity to unintentionally cringeworthy-levels, but these instances are few and far between.

While the characters may be a bit stale, the story is anything but. While a similar movie, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, opted to make light of the genre by inserting slasher tropes into the real world, Final Girls sidesteps reality entirely. Pulling the real world characters into a movie world allows the story to explore the comedic side of slashers in a whole new way entirely. What might be stale and frustrating in non-comedies, flashbacks, voice-overs, characters with no depth, etc, becomes a playground for inventive new ideas in The Final Girls. It establishes firm rules in which its world operates, then plays by those rules to great effect. It manages to both effectively mock slashers while creating something completely distinct for itself!

This imaginative elbow-to-the-ribs-satire vibe is only dampened by the films refusal to go for the throat. Slashers are known for their excesses, a balance between stupid raunch and blunt morality tale. The Final Girls wants to have it both ways, it tries to pay homage to the slasher as a concept, yet stays safely within the confines of a very conservative PG-13. As I personally am not a fan of the slasher genre in general due to its excesses, I found the restraint in The Final Girls to be right up my alley; however there are moments where the film feels chained up. The choice to hold back in key areas feels made in a boardroom. Some of the restraint doesn’t feel natural, despite my personal appreciation of that choice.

Overall, if a horror-comedy send up of the slasher genre with a faint Back to the Future vibe mixed with original and unexpected ideas in a PG13 package sounds fun, you’re in for a treat with The Final Girls! Honestly, this movie has something that’ll appeal to most viewers. The only people I can think of who might not like this one are people who’ve never liked fright films in any capacity.

-Josh Evans