The Final Girls

Max and Nancy share a moment

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), … Read more

John and the Hole

John looks into the hole

John and the Hole is a story written by Nicolás Giacobone, so there’s a weird element along with the everyday. He also wrote Birdman, which interspersed familiar scenes of an actor in crisis preparing for a show with moments where he’d be transformed into the superhero he’d played years before. In Biutiful, the 2010 movie starring Javier Bardem, the story of a man dying of cancer is interpolated with moments of magical realism. John and the Hole does the same, but differently. At one level it’s a straightforward story of a 13-year-old boy who might be on the autistic spectrum – he’s certainly very closed off and has a knack for mathematics – who … Read more