On Tubi, I watched The Final Girls, a 2015 horror comedy directed by Thomas Strauss-Schulson and co-written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. The movie stars Taissa Farmiga as Max, a teen girl whose mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) is an actress that is best known for her "scream queen" role in a 1986 slasher film called Camp Bloodbath. In the present day of the 2010s, she only has a handful of screen credits, is broke, and is still typecast from her horror role and unable to be cast in other projects. On the way home from a film audition, the two get into a car accident and Amanda is killed.
Three years later, Max, an orphan living with her aunt, is hanging out with her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat) and Chris (Alexander Ludwig), when Gertie's stepbrother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), a horror film nerd, shows up and tells them that Camp Bloodbath 1 and 2 are showing at the local theater, and wants Max to make an appearance there to talk about her mother at a Q&A afterwards. Max is hesitant, not wanting to watch her mother die on screen or talk about a movie that her mother was sick of being associated with. But they go to the theater, where Chris' ex-girlfriend and Max' former best friend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) shows up, trying to woo Chris back. During the movie, the theater is accidentally set ablaze by a stray cigarette and a rolling bottle of liquor on the floor, and the group of friends can only escape through cutting a hole in the movie screen, trying to find an exit, but end up in the movie itself.
The group are in the woods, and a van comes by with two of the Camp Bloodbath characters, Tina (Angela Timbur), a ditzy "slut" archetype, and Kurt (Adam Devine), a jockbro stereotype frequently making sexual comments about women. The group initially turn down the ride to the summer camp, but a title card reads "92 minutes later" (the runtime of both the fictional movie and this real movie), the van comes back again with Tina and Kurt, saying their same lines, NPC-style, and again 92 minutes later. The group realizes they will be in a time loop if they don't get in the van and continue the plot, so they pretend to be new camp counselors and go to the camp, where Max meets Nancy (Akerman), and while she knows it's not really her mother, she wants to save Nancy from dying in the movie, transferring her feelings about wanting to save her real mother from death.
The group initially lets two murders happen without interference, but when their interference causes characters to die out of order, or realizing that not being movie characters doesn't make them immune, more calamity happens, as the group realizes they are not going to survive just following the original movie's plot, and have to be more creative, as well as interacting with the movie characters who don't know that they aren't real people.
I really enjoyed this movie a lot. I liked the gags like when Nancy is telling the origin story of the slasher killer, and gray matter starts dripping from the roof and wraps up the group and transports them to the black-and-white 1950s flashback of the killer's story as Nancy is narrating, having to step over large subtitles reading "Summer 1957" in block letters. Or when Kurt gets called out by Chris for his homophobia, hearing Chris has two gay dads, and mockingly goes, "Oh, do they go to discos and have sex with each other?" before dropping the derisive tone and adding, "Actually, that does sound kind of cool." Devine is really good in this movie, in playing the 80s horny guy stereotype who constantly objectifies women with crass language and obviously mocking him.
The heart of the film is with Max and Nancy/Amanda, and Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman are excellent in this film. Max is still just a kid, and even if Farmiga was about 20 when she was in the film, she brings a lot of young vulnerability to this role, as a girl who lost her mother too soon, and is trying to save a version of her to bring her back. And Akerman is so warm and kind as Nancy, who initially starts in the fictional film as "I'm just a shy girl who's a virgin and wants to have sex with this cool guy" before getting killed, and as Nancy is further developed as a person, she talks about wanting to go to college and do more with her life and not be so shy. Even if Max can't let on to Nancy that she sees her as her mother, Nancy does take more of a big sister/mothering role to Max, caring about her, and the finale with them and the use of "Bette Davis Eyes," the song playing in the car before the accident, is incredibly moving and stunning, with a synth score and gorgeous colors.
The film was co-written by Joshua John Miller, a former child actor who was in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Near Dark, River's Edge, and Teen Witch. His father, Jason Miller, played the priest in The Exorcist, and Miller said the film was partially inspired by that experience, saying ""I grew up watching my dad in The Exorcist, and there's something haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film. But it's something that also becomes iconic, and we tried to deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance, but your second chance was inside of a movie?" It works really well in the film, as Max is struggling with her grief and seeing a version of her mother and wanting to save her, even when knowing that Nancy isn't real.
I had heard that this film was really good, and I'm glad I caught it on Tubi, I found it much more moving, as well as funnier, than I expected.
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