Spoilers! (Duh)
Fans of comedy and slasher movies get a chance to mingle over this fun, self-aware horror movie/comedy. The Final Girls is about a kid with a mom who starred in an 80s slasher flick a while back. Mom now struggles to find acting gigs but is otherwise a pretty decent mother. Then she’s dead.
Queue the violins, metaphorically speaking.
Kid gets coerced by step-brother, and her own raging teen hormones, to attend a screening of her mother’s slasher movie, wherein an alcohol-induced fire traps everyone in the theater and kid “slashes” the playing movie screen for her group to escape…
Into the movie they were watching. Ensuing mayhem, and an odd family reunion, takes place. There is one last twist at the end I will not spoil here. But here’s a hint: what’s better for slashing people than one machete?
So, you get the meta-movie idea, right? One of the kids now trapped in the movie is a fan of this cult classic, so he knows everything that will happen, and how the movie ends. The kids make all sorts of unwarranted assumptions about how to get themselves home, and proceed to bumble their way in that direction.
The most interesting part of the movie is the tension between daughter and mom. Now, “mom” in this case is roughly the same age as her daughter, and this is the character she played, not the actual person, but their heart-felt connection is an excellent way to control the pace between the inevitable gory (if hilarious) death scenes. Where most movies in this genre would place an utterly ridiculous make-out session to slow things down, or maybe have one character break down so the others could appear sympathetic, in The Final Girls we get something different. And I liked it.
So, that’s my review. I liked the movie. It was entertaining, filled most of the boxes, had a unique perspective on pacing, and hit me with a twist I did not (but probably should have) seen coming. I blame my lack of prediction on a particular cat that plead for attention at all the wrong moments.
In the words of Maximus, are you not entertained? Well, you should be.
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