Review: The Final Girls (2015)

Despite my hatred of horror movies (hate is a strong word, I’m actually just a wimp) I think I might have found my happy medium this October. Horror Comedies! Just enough spookiness to make me nervous, but plenty of laughs to distract myself. This one will have been my third watch this year (after Cooties and The Visit) and I’m definitely on the hunt now for some more. Any recommendations?

Sort of tumbling into the sci-fi category also, The Final Girls is a horror comedy that likes to poke fun at itself. During a special screening of Camp Bloodbath & Camp Bloodbath II, a devastating fire breaks out in the theatre and Max (Taissa Farmiga) and her friends Chris (Alexander Ludwig), Vicki (Nina Dobrev), Gertie (Alia Shawkat) and Duncan (Thomas Middleditch) find themselves trapped inside the movie itself in their attempt to escape.

Even I know those basic horror movie rules. Anyone who takes their clothes off and has sex will die, and in the end there will be just one girl left, a virgin at that, who manages to kill the killer and live to the end. The killer themselves will have been the victim of something awful years before, which made them the killer they are, yet they are nothing but a legend to the characters in the movie.

I really love the concept of The Final Girls. From the moment the group stepped into the movie, and the van drove past playing the same music every 92 minutes as if on a loop, I was just amused. Something that I don’t often pay attention to are the sets, I get too engrossed in dialogue most of the time, but they were great in this. Visually, The Final Girls is beautiful which I didn’t expect from a low budget movie.

Something else that surprised me was the amount of heart the movie had. Okay, at one point it got a little too sappy and I was sort of expecting something goofy to happen to lighten the mood a little, but I actually wouldn’t change that scene because it was quite beautiful.

Of course, this movie would be nowhere near as funny if it didn’t have Adam DeVine in it. The guy is hilarious, and there are some outtakes of his during the credits which show how much he was ad-libbing, which I love.

Definitely worth a watch!