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!

Review: Let's Be Cops (2014)

So, here's a funny story. I had been looking forward to Let's Be Cops for ages, and I wrote my review pretty much straight away, and then Jenna destroyed it. Well, what I mean is that her laptop somehow duplicated our Premium Rush review and deleted my Let's Be Cops one. Sadface! That was ages ago now, but I was just in Letterboxd when I realised I had copied and pasted my review in there! So, resurrected from the dead, here's my review!

Note to Jenna's laptop: Please be kind, I really want to publish this! Sorry!!

On a plus note, since all that happened I have managed to see the film so I can comment :-)

Let's Be Cops is a fake buddy cop movie about two friends, Ryan (Jake Johnson) and Justin (Damon Wayans Jr) who have never found their true calling in Los Angeles. They decide to move back to their home town, but first they go to a costume party as cops. It turns out that they pass for the real deal, and so the two friends pretend to be real cops, which lands them in trouble with a local crime gang.

I worried that all the funny moments would be in the trailer leaving nothing else, but I was wrong. There were plenty of moments where I laughed out loud, mainly due to the chemistry between the two main characters. I read that most of the dialogue was improvised, which worked really well. The film itself introduced a new character who I don't remember being in the trailer, Pupa, played by Planet's Funniest Animals host, Keegan-Michael Key. Pupa was hilarious. He was the highlight of the film for me!

The only thing that let the film down for me was that there was virtually nothing new brought to the table. There's the basic plot of two guys pretending to be cops, but then everything else is just a mash-up of other films I've seen. The plot was almost the same as The Heat for a start, Pupa reminded me a lot of Jamie Foxx's character in Horrible Bosses, and there was an End of Watch vibe to it all too. I can forgive it though, because it's still really funny.  

I think they were aiming for the success of The Heat but the male version but lets not kid about, this is not The Heat, this isn't even in the same area code as The Heat!  Yes it's funny but it for me it wasn't hilarious and its not at all memorable, I can run off 20 brilliant one-liners from The Heat but I am struggling to remember a single funny part from this!

I thought the soundtrack was brilliant too, once I find out what the name of that dub-step song is, it'll be playing in my little girly car as I drive to the supermarket on a Sunday morning! Hard as nails, me.

All in all, Let's Be Cops wasn't as good as I hoped it would be, but it was still a funny film and I wasn't disappointed. Bring on Horrible Bosses 2! <--- obviously this was written a while ago!! haha!