Taking a break from discussing the pandemic and inept responses to it I’m going to talk about a film you can rent streaming right now The Final Girls.

A ‘final girl’ is the remaining character in a slasher film that defeats the slasher during the movies climax and the film The Final Girls is a horror/comedy directly parodying the tropes and clichés of the mass-produced movies of the 80s slasher craze.

Horror and comedy are difficult genres to combine and honestly most of the time this is attempted it fails for me. In my opinion it tends to work best in one of two modes.

• If you front load the comedy and drop it out nearly entirely once the threats turn lethal then you have a horror film with strong comedic overtones and that can work.
• Exaggerated comedy throughout the piece but then the threats must remain low or be negated by the final resolution.

The Final Girls is an example of the second approach and the filmmakers manage to pull it off.

Max (Taissa Farmiga) is the daughter of an actress who made a particularly bad slasher film in the mid-80s, Camp Bloodbath, but her mother has passed away and Max has been unable to cope with her loss. Pressured by a friend she and her friend attend a revival screening of her mother’s horror film but during a theater fire they flee through the screen and end up inside Camp Bloodbath. Using their knowledge of slasher clichés and dealing with character limited by their stereotypes Max and her friends must survive to the end when the ‘final girl’ can dispatch the slasher and they can return home all while Max learns to deal with her mother’s death.

Written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua Miller and directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson The Final Girls is a fast, funny comedy with a sentimental heart. The parody aspect speaks filmmakers that have a deep affection for the genre and plays with the clichés and tropes without ever ‘punching down’ at the fans of slasher movies. Using a structure much like The Wizard of Oz, the movies turns on a central character and her journey to a fantastic realm while giving just enough character growth and change to keep the entire movie from feeling pointless. It possesses some of the best modest budget CGI I have seen and it light enough on the violence to keep it campy and over the top rather than graphic and gory.

Overall this is a nice piece of entertainment that is worth watching and may help keep your mind of more realistic horrors