Review of The Final Girls (2015) by Michael M — 13 Nov 2015

I wanted to love this movie, it has all the trappings of a movie I should love. I love meta humor, I love movies about movies, and I love slashers. The execution doesn't work quite as well as it could have. To start with the good, the movie can be very funny and very clever. There were a lot of moments that had me laughing out loud, some great and memorable characters (certainly more than you get in a normal slasher movie) a decent slasher backstory in the film-within-a-film, and some clever moments like the characters interacting with the title cards that appear on screen.

To be completely honest, the good mostly outweighs the bad, but the bad still sticks out like a sore thumb. First, it has to be said, the movie is rated PG-13. Why? The target audience for this thing is going to be people who have seen a lot of slasher movies, and they're almost exclusively rated R. So why tone it down? Go all out, give us the sex and the kills that this genre is known for. I'm not saying every movie needs to be rated R, but this one definitely should have been, and as it stands it feels pretty weak. The second big issue is the choice of director. Todd Strauss-Schulson has done work for College Humor and the directed A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, and he's great for that stuff, and he has a distinct style. This style doesn't work for a slasher though, it's just too pretty and there's too much CGI. I would have preferred a darker and grittier film to match the tone of the genre it parodying.

The problems of this film really stick out to me, but only because the rest of it is so good and I see the potential of what this film could have been. This movie could have been great, a classic genre parody in the vein of Cabin in the Woods or Scream. Instead it's just good. It's a lot of fun, and genre enthusiasts will get a kick out of it, but it could have been more.