Meta-slasher horror, the last refuge of the scoundrel – discuss. If you can’t make a decent straight-up slasher movie, why not put a frame around it and serve it up with an ironic wink, right?
Prejudices laid out on the table, The Final Girls actually turns out to be a decent meta-slasher horror movie, with no scoundrels in sight, a good cast, sharp, smart direction and a high concept powerful enough to get it through a tight 90 minutes of jokes, shrieks, gruesomeness and a complete lack of bare breasts. You can’t have everything.
Its premise: here in the early decades of the 21st century (the movie’s from 2015 so probably about there), the daughter of a former scream queen looks on in dismay as her mother, still auditioning for serious roles and still getting nowhere, tears her hair out over her stalled career. If only, mom opines, I’d never appeared in that dratted Camp Bloodbath movie, which got me totally pigeonholed as a bimbo actress with nothing to offer but my big lungs.
In a hasty let’s-get-to-the-meat-of-the-movie bit of plot progression, Mom (Malin Akerman) is soon dead in a car accident and daughter Max (Taissa Farmiga) has been transported – magic sprinkles or something – back to 1986, into that selfsame movie, Camp Bloodbath, with four friends, some of whom are not going to make it out alive.
The big question, as ever, is who’s going to be the final girl (or girls)? The one who survives the relentless bloodshed and eventually neutralises the killer and escapes soaked in blood and quaking, tight-fitting white T-shirt optional.
Modern kids in a 1980s slasher movie. You might have seen the same concept worked through more recently in Totally Killer, which takes a similar idea and twists it into a different shape, though both movies use the 1980s to interrogate the present and the present to interrogate the 1980s – beer-chugging horndog jocks do not come out of either movie well. Bananarama songs turn up in both.
What’s good about The Final Girls is that the Camp Bloodbath movie that Max and pals wind up in is the sort of terrible slasher movie it’s good to watch being lambasted, even 40 years on. Silly girls in teeny tiny shorts discussing their impending loss of virginity, bragging lads keen to get those teeny tiny shorts off, a masked killer with a big machete who arrives on the scene whenever those teeny-tiny shorts look like they’re about to be loosened.
In a second role as Nancy, the character Max’s mother portrayed in Camp Bloodbath, Malin Akerman gets to interact with Farmiga more than seemed initially likely (what with Max’s mother dying early on and all). This is a good thing. They’re good actors and together create an oasis of genuine emotion towards the end as they bond over the realisation that their lives are constrained by the hands (or scripts, in Nancy’s case) they’ve been dealt. Nancy, shy and lacking confidence, is almost certainly heading for an appointment with a machete. Farmiga’s Max is a young woman who knows the blonde in front of her isn’t her mother, even though superficially she obviously is, and Farmiga nimbly walks that tightrope without either getting confused herself or confusing us.
There is depth in the cast. Angela Trimbur – as Tina, the bimbo in the dayglo bikini top – seizes her moment and shakes the laughs out of it. Adam Devine is relentlessly funny as Kurt, a smirking beerpong crusader whose brain cannot get off the subject of sex. Actually they’re all good – Thomas Middleditch as movie nerd Duncan, Alia Shawkat as Max’s new bestie Gertie (if this were Scooby Doo she’d be Velma), Nina Dobrev as Max’s old bestie and mean girl stand-in Vicki.
It’s incredibly likeable, if shocking death makes you smile, and director Todd Strauss-Schulson shows he knows his way around slasher movie set-ups. Yes, it does need to clear its throat a bit before it gets going, but once it does it really motors. And it saves its best joke right for the end, which is a killer touch.
The Final Girls – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
