Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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The Final Girls (2015) FM
Scream meets Last Action Hero with a soupcon of Groundhog Day in the derivative yet inspired 2015 meta-horror comedy The Final Girls. Director Todd Strauss-Schulson’s follow-up to 2011’s A Harold & Kumar 3-D Christmas is a loving tribute to the irresistible cheesiness of the summer camp slasher subgenre that thrived in the 1980s by offering young audiences a lurid cocktail of sex, violence, moralism, and voyeurism.
Scream queen Taissa Farmiga leads a cast full of television-trained ringers, including Workaholics’ Adam DeVine and Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat as plucky heroine Max Cartwright. She’s a grief-stricken survivor still reeling from the death of her beloved actress mother, Amanda (Malin Akerman, in a Fangoria Chainsaw Award-nominated performance) in a car accident three years earlier.
When Max and her friends attend a retrospective screening of Camp Bloodbath, a 1986 camp classic of the so-bad-it’s-good variety that Amanda worried represented her enduring legacy as an actress, they end up inside the film’s world thanks to movie magic.
Silicone Valley’s Thomas Middleditch is a manic delight in the Jamie Kennedy role of the pop culture-obsessed trash culture fanatic who knows all the rules of horror movies, so he also knows that he’s in one.
Screenwriters Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin have tremendous fun with the well-worn cliches of Reagan-era camp horror, while the tender bond between Akerman and Farmiga’s characters gives the postmodern terror tale an unexpected substance. The Final Girls exists almost entirely in the tragic shadow of Amanda’s early, random death. That lends a melancholy, bittersweet quality to a post-Scream winner that is otherwise exceedingly clever in a glib way.
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