The Final Girls
This was a pleasant surprise. A group of modern-day teens are Purple Rose of Cairo-ed (that's a thing, right?) into an 80's slasher called Camp Bloodbath and have to figure out how to get back home...and how to survive the night.
It's a concept that has been done before, but there's enough enthusiasm and creativity on display that it mostly works. The real surprise is how genuinely sweet the movie is. The Final Girl herself, Max (Taissa Farmiga), is the daughter of Amanda (Malin Akerman), one of the stars of Camp Bloodbath who was tragically killed in a car accident a few years before Max and her friends were sucked into the movie. Max sees this as a chance to save her mother, which may prove difficult as the character Amanda plays in Camp Bloodbath is doomed to die at the hands of Billy, the Jason Voorhees-esque slasher who haunts the camp. While The Final Girls is a comedy first and foremost, it truly does keep the emotions grounded in reality and it's much more effective than one might expect.
The comedy is somewhat less successful. It's more a source of mild chuckles than full-on laughs, but the movie has so much heart that it's easy to forgive the stuff that doesn't really work. The cast is strong (I tend to find Adam Devine more grating than funny, but that sort of works for him here as his character is meant to be boorish) and Farmiga and Ackerman are particular standouts, deftly balancing comedy and sentiment. It's a fun, fast-paced watch that's a nice antidote to some of the grimness on display in so many modern horror movies. A good breather in the middle of Scary Movie Month.
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