Finally Meeting the Final Girls of My Dreams...

The Final Girls (2015)
Dir: Todd Strauss-Schulson
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Getting exactly what you want from a movie is both infectious and dangerous. Infectious, because it brightens the rest of your day (and even week), you get so excited because you want to share that feeling with everyone you meet, and you now can't imagine life without that film being a part of it. (How did I ever cope beforehand?) And dangerous, because you now want every film you see in the same genre to meet those same expectations. This would all be very nice, but unless you are someone who is either daft or just too easy to please about everything, it is a truly Herculean task.

The Final Girls is not a great work of art. It won't win or even get nominated for any major awards (not even a leg lamp). It will not change mankind or bring about world peace. But The Final Girls did give me precisely what I was looking for in an presumed horror-comedy based around the increasingly popular and ironic notion of the "final girl," the last, would-be distaff victim of a slasher film who rises above everything to come out victorious (in most cases) against the film's monstrous killer.

Last week, I posted a review of another film (the first originally announced for production as it were) that was released this year (after being shelved for a while) called Final Girl. That film was an absolute disappointment in relation to the excitement I felt when I first heard a film with that title was being made. Underneath that frosting of eagerness, Final Girl turned out to taste of nothing but regret. [You can read my review here.] Worst of all, it had essentially purloined that phrase to have it rejigged into something that had nothing to do with the style of film from which the term sprang to ironic life.

But enough about the lesser film. Here we have The Final Girls, from director Todd Strauss-Schulson, whose resume, when first surveyed, doesn't appear to hold much promise. The biggest film (or mark against him, depending on your opinion of it) to date was A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, which I enjoyed far more than the second film in the series, though not even close to as much as the first. Other than that, while Strauss-Schulson has many shorts, videos and TV episodes listed in his filmography, I have not seen a single one of them. So, I really didn't have a solid grasp of his capabilities going into this film.

As for the screenwriters, Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin, there was only one other writing credit on their collective resume, and that was a short film from last year called Dawn. Nominated at the Sundance Film Festival for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize, Dawn is a decent first effort by novice director Rose McGowan (yes, that Rose McGowan, who is now set to helm her feature film debut, The Pines), but its screenplay is fairly obvious and doesn't betray the sense of humor at large throughout The Final Girls.

In settling down for a viewing, what I was hoping for, after seeing the other film, was a project that embraced the concept of "the final girl" properly. Beyond that were faint wishes that the makers would have some fun with the concept, and not churn out just another sour slasher film that only winked mildly at its audience. As it turns out, The Final Girls doesn't even know how to wink mildly. It walks up, sticks its eye as close to yours as it can, tilts its head as it winks its eye as blatantly as possible, opens its eye up again, smiles a broad, shit-eating grin, and then jabs you in the ribs with a sharp elbow to make sure you received the joke efficiently.

This is not to say the film doesn't have its subtleties. It actually thrives on them. The story is set up sweetly but tragically as we meet Max (played by Taissa Farmiga, Vera's half-as-young little sister) and her mother, Amanda Cartwright (a radiantly wistful Malin Akerman). Amanda is a former scream queen from the late '80s who has never been able to shake the typecasting wrought by her appearance in Camp Bloodbath, a very Friday the 13th-type slasher that has gone on to cult status. Rejected at yet another audition because of her past, a frantic Amanda doesn't pay attention to the road as she goads Max into lip-syncing to her favorite song, Bette Davis Eyes, and when Max accidentally drops coffee on Amanda's 8x10s, the car is sideswiped and sent rolling to Amanda's death.

Three years later, Max hasn't recovered emotionally from her mother's demise, but she is still susceptible to other people getting her to take part in things she really shouldn't. Her friends, the hippieish Gertie (Arrested Development's Alia Shawkat) and the purposefully bitchy Vicki (of The Vampire Diaries and DeGrassi, neither of which I have ever seen), meet her at a midnight movie showing of Camp Bloodbath, for which he has been talked into making an appearance in honor of her late mother by hipster geek Duncan (Thomas Middleditch). Max also meets the super hunky Chris (Alexander Ludwig, who coincidentally happened to play the main fratboy villain in Final Girl), with whom Max will sort of bond on their adventure (their certain romance is an underplayed aspect of the screenplay).

Via the interference of some utter jerks smoking and drinking during the screening, a fire breaks out in the movie theatre. With the exits blocked by screaming Camp Bloodbath fans, Max picks up a machete, the primary weapon of the film's villain, Billy, which has been dropped by an erstwhile fan in the audience. She uses the machete to cut open the movie screen to make an escape, and her friends follow her...

...into Camp Bloodbath the film. What we have in The Final Girls is a variation of what many will say is The Purple Rose of Cairo, but I would prefer to point out Buster Keaton's seminal Sherlock Jr. (1924), one of my favorite films where Buster is a projectionist who falls asleep in his booth and dreams himself not just into the movie, but also in entering the film through the screen from the stage in the movie theatre, where he has to deal initially with the scenery changing constantly around him. Soon enough, he becomes the main character in the film.

Time is not the same inside the film Camp Bloodbath, and the five real life people now have to learn how to play by the rules of the slasher movie they are in, where even the hint of sexual contact gets you killed, and scenes play in a loop if you don't go along with the plot correctly. There are plenty of jokes made at the expense of (and big laughs pulled from) the stereotypical characters found in your average slasher film, and the characters act largely in the preprogrammed manner in which you expect. They do stupid things, and there are terrifying results for that stupid behavior. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of scenes where the lost group continually meets the same VW bus every 92 minutes exactly (the running time of the film) or where teen vixen Tina (portrayed to a perky T [and A] by Angela Trimbur) needs to be tied up in a life preserver and oven mitts to keep her from popping her top off and thus invite serial killer Billy to attack again. Comedian Adam Devine does his intentionally annoying best as the would-be hunk of the film within the film, who is made up almost entirely of testosterone, and who can't even breathe without making a sexual reference (even though he doesn't really need to breathe at all). Especially effective is the use of how a flashback works inside the film within the film, which may come in handy later for the protagonists (or maybe not sometimes).

Behind the laughs though, something else pulses at the center of The Final Girls. The appearance of these five "other counsellors" in Camp Bloodbath (the actual camp, not the film, as the characters within are at first unaware they exist only inside a movie) has flustered them somewhat, and has at least one of them -- Nancy (also Akerman), the "sweet but shy girl with a guitar" who is Max's mother's character in Camp Bloodbath -- pondering her fate. Doomed to sleep with Kurt, and thereby die at the hand of Billy, over and over again, Nancy begins to bond with Max, who -- as she was in real life -- is still fiercely protective of her mother.

While the more jaded of you out there might see this component as unnecessary sappiness, the scenes between Max and the film version of her mother are what gives real heart to The Final Girls. Without this vital element, the film could just come off as another heartless spoof of horror films. In a film set up as a parody of low art, Farmiga and Akerman impart their characters with enough real feeling, that ultimately makes The Final Girls a comic meditation on loss and how to move forward from it. There are just a lot of broad laughs along the way to cushion you.

Thankfully, She Is Not the FINAL Final Girl…

Final Girl (2015)
Dir: Tyler Shields
TC4P Rating: 4/9

I first heard that a film bearing the title "Final Girl" was in production a few years ago. The slightest research finds press releases from 2012 that hit the internet announcing such a project, and that jibes with my general memory. I thought at the time that if the film held tight to the implications of such a title -- that of a genre effort commenting on the post-ironic notion of a "final" surviving heroine amidst serial killer carnage -- that the film could prove most interesting, or at least fun. 

And then Final Girl, at least in my encounters online, laid low for a good while. As a result, it went off my radar to a degree, but every now and then I would get around to checking IMDb for a status update on the project. Each check-in would bring added confusion. Yes, Final Girl was still being made, but filming was just now getting underway. The movie was completed, but now there is another production called The Final Girls being planned. Final Girl was set to come out, but then no, it's not. The Final Girls is in production, but why hasn't Final Girl come out? Has it been shelved? How bad is it? Then, Final Girl was set to come later in 2015 on DVD and online. But, suddenly The Final Girls was coming out on both platforms as well? I gotta sit down...

Adding more confusion was the fact that one actor, Alexander Ludwig, stars as one of the male leads in both films. Different producers, directors and writers... same guy in both films with very similar titles (but not necessarily themes). Then came news of a television show in production for fall 2015 called Scream Queens, which also features Oscar-winning actress Abigail Breslin, who just so happens to be the star of Final Girl, the film starting all of this. What was going on? Had the universe imploded?

I will get to the other projects later this month. I won't see The Final Girls until later this week, and I am giving Scream Queens a couple more episodes to play out some storylines, before I tackle reviewing them. But I have now seen the first of the films, Final Girl, and you don't have to get too far into the film to see what the delay was. I can now readily admit that I should never have gotten excited for the project in the first place. I wouldn't go so far as to say the film should have been shelved permanently, for I feel any movie production should get a chance to either find its audience or repel it. I am a big one for film "closure," that satisfying sense one gets in accomplishing lists of films, or at least getting to say, "Seen it. Seen it. Seen it. Gotta see it. Seen it," as you run your eyes or index finger down a series of titles. Not getting to at least pay a single visit to Final Girl would be a curse upon my personal methods.

Final Girl employs the now popular term derived from horror films, but is itself not even close to belonging to that genre. It plays on elements from horror, but barely touches on them, and is far more content splitting itself between the action, revenge, and thriller genres at fairly equal levels. The chief problem is that it never really commits to any of them, and the film feels sloppier for it. A film done in such a way can have a ragged charm, especially if it sticks to maintaining a comic tone, but Final Girl has little in the way of any charm at all.

The plot concerns Veronica (Breslin), whose parents died when she was a young girl, and who is adopted by a man named William (Wes Bentley). Having seen his wife and child murdered years earlier, he raises Veronica to become his weapon of revenge upon those who would commit such crimes. After twelve years and a final test involving a drug combination that allows Veronica to confront her core fear (that of failing William so that he must kill her), William gives her a first mission. 

Women are disappearing in a small town, and there is a quartet of young men responsible: leader Jamison (played by Ludwig), Nelson, Shane, and Daniel, four fratboy types who dress perfectly in suits, pick up a blonde girl at a local diner, drive her out to the woods, and then make her run for her life while they hunt down and murder her. (They never stoop to raping their victims, because sexual assault makes it hard for the girls to run properly.) Of course, police investigation is non-existent (the number of victims is cited variously as eleven or 21, so you'd think that would get something started). After so many blonde women in the town have disappeared, I would hope that every remaining blonde would have gone back to their natural hair color or simply hidden under wigs. Veronica sets herself up as the next victim, and the remainder of the film is how she deals with the four murdering assholes.

I will go no further with plot details so as not to spoil anything for those who do wish to view the film as I did. But it will not ruin the rest of the movie to say that one of the chief failings of the film is in establishing that it takes place anywhere believable. I guess the film is supposed to be in the late 1950s owing to the cars, fashion, and music, but simply using an old diner as your one solid set design (apart from the campfire couches in the forest) really did not make me believe in the story any more. Having one of the frat jerks dancing and lip-syncing (badly) to rockabilly music while he combs his hair in celebratory foreplay over getting to kill another girl that evening only brought me sincere doubts that the actor had ever heard that type of music before.

The mailbox baseball game the boys play with Veronica as they drive about only points out how ill-conceived the film is. After watching one of the boys use a baseball bat to demolish, in succession, a mailbox and a signpost on the side of the road, Veronica is given her turn. Her first attempt is meant to look weak (she is now a trained assassin... supposedly), but her second attempt totally smashes the sign to pieces and impresses the boys greatly. The problem is that Breslin seems to have Muppet arms in this film, and her second swing has no greater power to it than the first one -- in fact, neither appears to even be actual swings, but just mere placements of the bat out of the window. In real life, her attempts would either have her ending up with broken wrists, having the bat ripped out of her hands, or both. I know it is not really fair to compare movie actions to real life ones, or all films would die ignoble deaths, but in this case, it just emphasized how little the makers considered many of the details in their film.

I am fine with Breslin's acting in this film; it is in her physical performance where she seems just so wrong for the piece. There is just no force at all behind the blows she is pretending to give, and so her action scenes (and the second half of the film is filled with them; luckily, her stunt double is far more convincing) just all fall so flat. The back half is supposed to be especially darkly comic, with the boys engaging Veronica in a too drawn-out game of Truth or Dare, but it is merely dull and obvious. Final Girl also relies too heavily on the use of the hallucinations of the drug combo that William not only uses on Veronica, but with which he also supplies her as one of her weapons (but not a gun, no... runs out of bullets, so what good could it be?) The hallucinatory scenes could have proven interesting and fun, if it wasn't clear from the rest of the film that they would come off as forced as everything else.

I cannot say that I am disappointed in Final Girl. It is pretty much what I was expecting, so I guess it was more the concept I was initially excited about when I first heard the title. There was potential in this film, and early on, with the odd relationship between Veronica and William, I thought Final Girl might have gone further abroad in the sense of genuine grindhouse thrills, taking a simple revenge setup and getting crazy with it. That the film is more content with staying tame enough to play on the Family Channel shows you that the wrong people were at the controls.