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View Full Version : The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson)



Henry Gale
10-15-2015, 02:58 AM
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IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2118624/) / Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Girls)

Henry Gale
10-15-2015, 07:46 PM
As much as I thought I was in the mood for this, I just couldn't get into it. Sorry, Sam Raimi poster quote!

It's one of those cases of something with a lot of people I like, with a premise I love (must have first heard about it years ago now, and had been looking forward to it since), and yet something just feels like it's in a stalled gear creatively. It's too modern-looking and CG-lenient to truly capture the drive-in '80s horror vibe it wants, the best comedic moments for me were all gestural or physical (Middleditch's rope trip was maybe the one time I actually burst out laughing), and the emotional core of it really didn't feel like it worked as well as it should've, possibly in large part because we only get one scene with "real" Akerman, and the rest is Farmiga struggling to find some solace with a fictional character. Even the idea of the inevitability of the character's fate and her having to go through it again and rise above it didn't play as strongly in the moment as when I just reconsidered what it was going for as I typed it. The Kim Carnes callback dance was easily the most striking and moving scene in the whole thing for me though.

Also, the movie's comedic reliance on Dobrev and especially the sexed-up bimbo counsellor (who I think might be a UCB person but either way isn't funny at all here) instead of so many more proven-to-be-capable performers in the cast (Middleditch, Shawkat, Akerman, and even DeVine with his kinda slim-range schtick) is really confusing, and stylistically falls into a category of being too much artifice and imitation to be feel like anything at all. It had some fun moments for me, but not even enough for 82 minutes.

Oh well.

** / 5.2

ciaoelor
11-01-2015, 10:23 PM
It's so genuinely heartfelt whenever Farmiga and Åkerman are on screen together that I wish it was a serious slasher instead of a spoof. There's just something inherently touching about watching a daughter reunite with her dead mother, especially when the mother is as optimistic and cheerfully naive as Åkerman plays her. But as a satire it isn't poking fun at anything remarkably worthy (the film within a film characters are dumb & horny - end of story). There is however some clever stuff regarding the experience of being trapped in a film that has end credits falling from the sky and flashback transitions that the characters can feel. But there's not enough of it. You leave the film thinking, "Oh, it could have done this! And that!.. And that and this!"