 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: The Final Girls • Year: 2015 • Country: USA • Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson • Main cast: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Akerman, Adam Devine • Runtime: 88 minutes • Production company: Groundswell Productions, Studio Solutions, Ulterior Productions • TRAILER |
It is hard to find a cinema genre with more homage films than horror. Perhaps porn, although they use to be pretty much parodies most of the time. Ok, comedies also have plenty of parodies of successful movies. But homages, like the word itself means, made with love and devotion for the originals, I think horror wins. And I am not talking about remakes or sequels.
The Final Girls is one of these homage to horror films. Clearly taking as reference the original Friday the 13th (1980), the tandem of screenwriters formed by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller sign a text where cliches take hand with originality, and what we have seen a zillion times being copied over and over again in movies for the last 40 years, here turns into jokes that mostly manage to work fine. Some of them are funny, some others are acceptable, but they all look pretty fresh. And most of that is thanks to director Todd Strauss-Schulson, a young filmmaker but with already quite an impressive background in short films and TV whose first big budget film was A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011). Okay, not a horror title, but already a funny comedy with sassy situations and with a successful work with the actors chemestry. Because this is what seems to be one of the big hits with The Final Girls, the good chemestry between the actors.
The cast is leaded by a young Taissa Farmiga, the youngest sister of Vera Farmiga, perhaps the newest horror mystery queen thanks to her work in The Conjuring series, among others. Besides her, some unknown faces, some other better known comedy performers. Malin Akerman, Alexander Ludwig, Nina Dobrev, Alia Shawkat, Thomas Middleditch, Adam Devine, Angela Trimbur or Chloe Bridges complete the cast. Their characters are very well defined, each one has a role, the promiscuous girl, the idiot funny guy, the horror flicks smartass, the voice of awareness… And all of them work perfectly fine. In a humorous sense, of course. But it fucking works!
I think the best feature of the movie is, over all, all those jokes about how predictable a horror movie can be, specially the classics from the 1980s. Don’t get me wrong, I love the classics, and I am aware it’s not “their fault”. But how many times have those plot twists, murderings, sentences and facts have been used over and over in uncountable films?
The plot is the least important thing here. If you only focus on the story, maybe the feeling of watching a lot of crap takes over your mind. Because the events are magical, impossible, are a work of fantasy. Don’t attempt to do what the movie pictures at home, because it might not work at all. But since the very begining, you already knew that wasn’t going to matter very much.
It is stated that the original idea of the film was to have a follow up. Actually, without the intention of spoil anything, I think it works. It works since the ending of the movie actually gives a good sauce toping to wrap up the global film, and also because done under the same terms as The Final Girls is done, a sequel could be very welcome.
The film had a successful run in films festivals a couple of years ago, winning best screeplay, Best Motion Picture and the Special Prize of the Jury at Sitges Film Festival 2015, or 2nd place People’s Choice Award at Toronto International Film Festival 2015, just to name a pair, so this is not the over excited opinion of a fan here, this is a good interesting film, worth to give a chance to any horror fan and also a fun watch for any lover of good funny flicks.
RATE: 6,5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2118624
