The Final Girls

Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson

Screenwriters: M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller

Genre: Comedy Horror

Every now and then a moving picture comes along that stands out from the rest. This time it’s the comedy horror film The Final Girls. IMBD’s description reads “A young woman grieving the loss of her mother, a famous scream queen from the 1980s, finds herself pulled into the world of her mom's most famous movie. Reunited, the women must fight off the film's maniacal killer.”

First off, let me say that the film navigates a plot that hasn’t really been done before, not in the horror genre that is. Extra Credit to the writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller who deliver an incredible blend of campy-slash-pensive-slash humor that pays homage to the 80’s horror flicks (namely Friday the 13th) by supplying a masked villain stalking a group of camp counselors. But it’s much much more than that. In fact, this homage exists only on the surface. Something more interesting and unprecedented drives this interesting plot about a teenage girl Max and her friends who are literally sucked into an 80’s movie starring Max’s mom, who died not too long before in real life, just before the teens enter the past of the movie-within-the-movie.

What this sets up is significant both in context and depth. While Max and her buddies must figure out how to survive in the movie and find a way out, Max’s grief over her mother’s death is salient throughout the film so that every time she encounters her mom, the star of the cheesy flick they’ve been sucked into, there’s a meaningful layer that keeps unfolding. Awesomely, this is not just a tangential part of the film but something at its core. The writers have created a story that plays off of the eighties horror movie conventions as a springboard for something more entertaining than we are used to; in short, a movie that uses dark humor in creative ways (no spoilers here) inside a horror-type medium while strengthening individual personalities and mending relationships.

The genre is named comedy/horror, but I think it breaks even that title as it bends it back and forth into an ultimately new hybrid. It’s funny, cheesy, a little bit scary, and serious all at once. To be more clear, as far as the 80’s rewind, one character’s dialogue is deliberately cheesy and yet he is aware of that. In fact, most of the characters recognize, once the future teens invade their world, that they are in a horror movie and have to manipulate or embrace its conventions in order to survive or fulfill the fated plot.

In many horror films, sex is often used as a marketable tool, but director Todd Strauss-Schulson caters to a smarter audience who has both a sense of humor and a desire for something more. Thus, the closest The Final Girls gets to sex is a young man in his underwear standing across a room, hoping for a sexual encounter, and a young woman in a bikini top (in a non-sexual way) who is simply fulfilling the expectations of the typical would-be “sex-starved” teen. Instead of submitting to the hollow drivel of trite material, Schulson makes this movie worth our time by offering us something smart, spirited, and thoughtful while making us laugh.

While gore is another facet of the traditional horror movies, Schulson keeps us away from it, and for that I am thankful. In its place we find a fun movie with memorable wit and heart.

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