October 11, 2015

The Final Girls (2015) - Saved From Writing The Dog Farm's Final Post?

     Though horror has been my lifelong genre of choice, I'm tickled shitless when any movie from any genre is as good as I hope it will be.  It doesn't happen as often as I would like.  I'm more likely to find myself relieved when a movie isn't as bad as I fear it could be, and that's a sad commentary.  Whether that's a sad commentary on what a miserable, jaded bastard I've become or on the general state of modern filmmaking is up for debate.

     More specifically, what most often separates the good movies from the bad for me is whether or not the movie makes me feel something - anything, really.  One of the primary reasons I've always been drawn to horror movies is that the best ones make you feel some of the deepest and most primal of human emotions.  The worst ones make one wonder how filmmakers so frequently fail to recognize the importance of those identifiably human emotions to effective storytelling.  This may come as a surprise given the Dog Farm's pedigree (pun intended), but I love a good cinematic tearjerker as much as a good horror movie - and for precisely the same reasons.

     I've been absent from the Dog Farm for a few months, and I now realize it was at least partially because my enthusiasm had been eroded of late by too many hollow spectacles and too few displays of real human emotion.  I don't think I consciously realized that until tonight, when a new release provided me the nourishment my cinematic diet had been lacking for so long.  Color me surprised that the movie in question was director Todd Strauss-Schulson's new comedy The Final Girls (2015), a very meta (and very funny) riff on slasher movie tropes that has more heart than any movie born of such an emotionally shallow sub-genre has a right to.  The Final Girls gets almost everything right, but it's most crucial success lies in the fact that it has the good sense to realize the importance - even in a goofy horror/comedy - of building on a solid foundation of identifiable human emotion.

     The Final Girls is perfectly cast, cleverly written, and beautifully shot, but its biggest triumph is the mother/daughter relationship at its core.  Taissa Farmiga (Amercian Horror Story) and Malin Ackerman (Cottage Country) make that relationship ring true even amidst all the silliness, and having a beating human heart beneath the levity raises the movie's game on all levels.  Delightful.  Truly delightful.

     I'm not going to thoroughly review The Final Girls here because there are already about a gazillion reviews online, and that's not what this post is really about anyway.  What this post is really about is how I lost my enthusiasm for one of the things I love most, and how one low budget horror/comedy done right restored it.  If you become disenchanted with the movies too, hang in there.  A good one will surface sooner or later that restores your faith, reminding you once again why you loved movies in the first place.  And it probably won't be the one you would expect, either.


12 comments:

  1. Glad to see you're back, and doubly relieved you haven't given up on movie blogging. You always have such a unique perspective, and that's why I keep coming back here. With that said, I guess I need to check this movie out! It's always rewarding to find a movie that restores your faith in modern filmmaking. I know I've had my doubts from time to time. Take care.

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    1. I really enjoyed The Final Girls, Barry, but you should know it's a horror/comedy with a strong emphasis on comedy. I was charmed by how much heart it had, but it really delivered the laughs, too. I chose not to actually review it because it's already getting loads of internet coverage, but I enjoyed it too much to not at least add my voice to the chorus. Sign of a good movie: I pay eight bucks to stream it, and then I'm pissed afterwards that I didn't put that eight bucks toward buying my own copy. I'm usually just pissed that I spent eight dollars. lol

      I haven't given up on movie blogging yet, but I definitely needed a break. Things will probably still stay pretty quiet here through the first of the year owing to a job in retail that eats up most of my time from November onward, but the domain will stay active. Thanks for being one of the primary supporters who keeps me interested. A guy likes to think at least a few folks are reading... :)

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  2. Good to hear some barking from The Dog Farm!

    You voice my disenchantment with the film industry at present, as well. So many directors, I feel, think episodically. So few are storytellers.

    For instance, I watched Bobcat Goldtwait's _Willow Creek_. His films have been inventive and different in the past, and the hype around WC got me so excited to watch the film. My heart sank when the premise did nothing more than take The Blair Witch formula, component for component, and simply substitute Bigfoot. By no means was this film a major success, but it did get critical praise. That, to me, is a warning sign that the people judging movies do not understand the core concepts--they want only to have impressive parts, not wholes. Much of the ballyhoo centered on the actors and the build up of tension; none commented on how much of a rip off the story turned out to be.

    While I understand that I sometimes get too caught up in how I wanted the movie to be rather than allow the filmmaker his or her creative license, I so rarely see a film that is unique due to its storytelling capability. When I herald a Christopher Nolan or Guillermo del Toro it is because they tell a story, not just mesh parts. The recent blockbusters, _Jurassic World_ and _Avengers...Ultron_ feel like stitched together parts that don't fit at all. _The Dark Knight_, however, moves with a fluidity that could only come from a well executed story.

    I will be sure to watch _The Final Girls_ and hope to have the same spark rekindled in myself. I also hope that more film tickle your fancy and allow such discussion. I know you may feel like one voice lost in a chorus, but when that one voice gets all the others singing in harmony it makes for a pretty darn good sound.

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    1. I had been curious about Willow Creek - Bobcat's God Bless America (2011) was interesting - but it takes A LOT now to get me to watch a found footage flick of any sort. It also came out at nearly the same time Exists (2014) did - also a found footage Bigfoot flick - and I guess I just didn't feel like I needed to watch two different versions of the same movie in close proximity to each other.

      Even after years of trying not to judge movies based upon what I wanted them to be rather than what the filmmaker had in mind, I still frequently fall into that trap. Thing is, I'm not as hard on myself as I used to be about it because fair or not, if I have to mentally apply an asterisk to my gut reaction then there was probably something about the movie - or the movie's approach to the subject matter - that wildly missed the mark.

      I'd even go so far as to say that I don't necessarily require that a movie offer a unique storytelling experience, just that it offer a story. The Final Girls is actually a pretty good example of that. The relationship between mother and daughter that the movie is built around isn't really anything groundbreaking in terms of storytelling, but it's implemented well - in a day and age when most spoofy horror/comedies of this sort wouldn't bother to implement it at all. The time is taken to set up the nuts and bolts of the relationship in an effective but economical narrative fashion, both actresses wisely sell this aspect of the story with sincere performances, and the movie is careful about how it gets its chocolate (the relationship) into its peanut butter (the comedy). As a consequence, every other aspect of the movie is more effective. Adrienne watched it with me, and whereas a slasher movie generally only solicits a shrug when a character is offed, we both had an oh-no-not-her kind of response to the fates of several characters. When is the last time you saw a slasher movie that evoked that response. The most recent one I can think of off the top of my head was probably when they offed Randy in Scream II...in 1997!

      Because the parts that worked in The Final Girls worked so well, I even found that I was able to overlook a lot of nitpicky things that probably would have irritated the hell out of me in other movies. For example, the timeline makes little sense. The slasher movie the kids get drawn into is clearly fashioned after a slasher movie from around 1981 or so, which would make Malin Akerman's mother in present day fiftysomething, which in turn means she would only have been a child when she made it. Along the same lines, there are several jokes - one involving a movie character cracking wise about Michael Jackson's Bad springs to mind - that don't quite match up to the time period the old slasher movie is clearly trying to invoke. I did not care at all, because those details aren't what the story was really about. Additionally, I was sufficiently invested in what the story was really about to cheerfully disregard these inconsistencies while in a lesser movie - one without a story to tell - these inconsistencies would have been the only thing the movie offered me to focus on.

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    2. I'm probably going to call my horror geek credentials into question when I say this, but I was never nearly as enamored of Cabin In The Woods as everyone else seemed to be. It was undoubtedly very clever and technically proficient, but I really didn't care at all about any character in that movie. Because I had no emotional investment in any of the characters, the movie as whole came off as a very slick and clever clockwork of a film that made little impression on me. I bring this up because Cabin In The Woods and The Final Girls both cover a lot of the same thematic ground. I loved The Final Girls, but I felt very meh about Cabin In The Woods, and my differing reactions mostly come down to the lack of sympathetic characters presented in the latter. Had Cabin In The Woods bothered to give its characters compelling story arcs, then I might have cared.

      Carl, you have a knack for prodding me into writing very long-winded comments. I've blathered on so long here that I may as well have written a proper review of The Final Girls. Believe it or not, Blogger forced me to break my comment into two separate comments because it deemed it too long. lol

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  3. No, you are not losing your Geek cred by not liking _Cabin in the Woods_. Everyone has the choice to pick and choose choices as long as those choices are wisely explained--and that's where you always deliver.

    I hope you are rethinking the Podcast idea because you would be great...

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  4. Very much Like you every so often a small break is needed, this turns into a hiatus and then it's hard to come back. I've had two long breaks now and I've only been blogging 3 or so years.

    When I do come back though, yours is always one of the blogs I return to; so know you do have a fan.

    The Final Girls does sound fun, and I'll be sure to check it out. As for Cabin in the Woods; I did like it though now you come to mention it probably because of it's technical proficiency and artificial cleverness, not it's heart or characters, and it's not a film I've felt like watching again... Need to ponder on this.

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    1. Thanks for visiting. I've been pleased to see Watching The Dead spring back to life recently. Because zombies, right? Take those breaks when you need to as long as you keep coming back from hiatus.

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  5. I'm sorry, sir, but you seem to have seen things in this movie that I did not. It was OK but not brilliant. To each their own, I guess. :)

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    1. For a counterpoint to my own thoughts on The Final Girls, here's the url for Bob's review of the movie:

      http://www.candycoatedrazor.com/2015/10/and-thats-final.html

      Bob is not as easily amused as me. lol

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  6. Fuck I hate living in the midwest. I won't be able to see this until it hits video but your damn right I am buying this when it does. Oooh a podcast. Can I be a guest

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    1. The Final Girls is available to stream, Vern. I watched it on Vudu. And yes, if and when a Dog Farm podcast happens, you can absolutely be one of my first guests!

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