It started with Back to the Future, of course, the idea that a troubled teen could fix the present by kicking ass in the past.
The Happy Death Day series introduces horror into the equation, and recent stabs at the genre include Totally Killer, a film reviewed here.
The Final Girls adds even more spice to the stew, as Max (Taissa Farmiga), grieving the death of her Scream Queen mother, Amanda Cartwright (Malin Ackerman), gets dumped into the early 1980s after a catastrophe at a screening of Mom’s most famous feature, Camp Bloodbath.
Director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin have a ball with a group of contemporary adolescents spun 40-plus years into the past to be fodder for a Jason Voorhees-style killing machine at a doomed summer camp.
Like the Scream franchise, the ability to adapt and survive by figuring out the “rules” of a slasher movie is the name of the game in The Final Girls, but the action also affords Max the chance to not only reconnect with her mother, but to act as a sort of spiritual advisor to a character carelessly described as “the shy girl with a guitar and a clipboard.”
Max and her friends travel even further back in time to witness the origin of the camp killer in the 1950s, and they all notice when the world around them is in black and white. One of them reckons she’s having a stroke because she’s suddenly colorblind!
The cinematography by Elle Smolkin also grabs our attention with a bevy of unbelievable shots, such as the killer, set ablaze, chasing the kids in slow motion. Or the apocalyptic purple sky during Max’s final battle.
There’s frightening fun in abundance, but there’s also inside jokes about lame movie stereotypes such as the airhead slut Tina (Angela Trimbur), who must be tied up to keep her from stripping off her clothes and summoning the killer.
Adam Devine from Workaholics delivers boffo laughs as Kurt, a one-dimensional stud from Hollywood’s disposable character drawer, who somehow makes his quest for endless nooky a righteous cause.
The Final Girls is an excellent example of a teen time-travel traumatic adventure. Maybe one of the best.
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