https://www.youtube.com/embed/zreNh78kTjg
Every once in a while in horror movies, you need someone to step in and hit the reset button. The genre needs to be run up flagpole so we can all have a good-natured laugh at its inherent silliness and abuse of tropes and over-the-top expressions sex and gore and so on. It's meta-horror, and it performs a difficult but important service. Wes Craven's Scream set the standard for self-referential scaring back in the 1990s. Cabin in the Woods moved the art into the new millennium, and now The Final Girls is finally taking its own stab at the sub-genre.
Director Todd Strauss-Schulson (A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas) takes us on a journey to Camp Bloodbath, the in-world "granddaddy of all campsite slasher films." It's the send-up version of every Sleepaway Camp-style movie you've ever seen, and it stars the mother of our protagonist, Max (Taissa Farmiga). Max's mom died before she ever really got to know her, but thanks to a terrible turn of events resulting in a theater fire during a showing of Bloodbath, Max gets a chance at seeing her mom again when they all walk through a dimensional rift in a movie screen and land in the fictional world of Camp Blue Finch. So not only will Final Girls be parodying the apex era of slasher movies, it will be set inside one, complete with flashback sequences and slow-motion escapes. Kapow! It sounds like a fun twist. Normally the horror satire doesn't actually travel through time and across planes of existence, so we like the boldness of the move, and there's a nice selection of Very Now comedic actors in play, too. Thomas Middleditch and Adam Devine are on board, presumably to be themselves. Alia Shawkat (forever under-appreciated) is thankfully also in the mix. Malin Ackerman is always good for a laugh. Nina Dobrev is showing us she's still busy after leaving Vampire Diaries and we will always turn out for Farmiga's emotionally fraught overwhelmed face.
Whether it succeeds or fails in lampooning its parent genre is yet to be seen, but Final Girls at least looks like it wants us to have a lot of fun. We accept.
Pause at: 0:44. All aboard the Reality Jumping Express! Taissa Farmiga can hold tears at their very limit of spilling over better than anyone else ever. See 1:00. Damn it. Final Girl down at 1:39. These kids know the rules and they are not going down quietly at 2:14.
Essential Quote: "I want chainsaws and big ass knives and I want them now!"—Vicki (Dobrev)
