Tragedy Girls (2017)
Directed by Tyler MacIntyre
McKayla and Sadie, two death-obsessed teenage girls, use their online show about real-life tragedies to send their small Midwestern town into a frenzy and cement their legacy as modern horror legends.
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5 films that influenced Tragedy Girls
What critics say influenced Tragedy Girls
With Tragedy Girls, director/co-writer Tyler MacIntyre has enough courage to focus on characters who aren't perfectly likable or admirable (it's reminiscent of Heathers in that way), using their friendship -- and their struggles to maintain that friendship -- as an anchor.
This deft touch can even paper over the film’s narrative shortcomings as an amusing idea that’s never fleshed out with the wit or momentum needed to achieve its true end goal of being the Second Coming of Heathers .
It was as if they’d seen “Heathers” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Scream” and “Scary Movie” and a dozen other self-referential hipster-slasher-clever films, and they were “owning it” and not acting it.
Here, they are teamed as deadly high school divas in a cynical, colourful exercise in satirical slasherdom, which harks back to such tart confections as Heathers, Scream and Election.
Fashionable, gorgeous and fearlessly attuned to what they want, these girls always look cool, whether they’re cheerleading, casually strolling their twitter feeds, or hacking through a corpse, and the film’s snazzy slang and edgy aesthetic calls to mind killer teen movies of the past, from Heathers, to Scream, to Jennifer’s Body, but falls just shy of matching their greatness.
Their rapport is so easy and authentic, that impossibly clever, rapid-fire slang that cannot fail to bring to mind such all-timers as Heathers and Jennifer’s Body .
Throughout the rest of film, viewers are treated to a series of horror film homages including Scream, Carrie, and Friday the 13th just to name a few.
Speaking of humor, the obvious (and overused) comparison would be to Wes Craven’s Scream, or maybe Joseph Kahn’s criminally underrated Detention.
It was as if they’d seen “Heathers” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Scream” and “Scary Movie” and a dozen other self-referential hipster-slasher-clever films, and they were “owning it” and not acting it.
Here, they are teamed as deadly high school divas in a cynical, colourful exercise in satirical slasherdom, which harks back to such tart confections as Heathers, Scream and Election.
Fashionable, gorgeous and fearlessly attuned to what they want, these girls always look cool, whether they’re cheerleading, casually strolling their twitter feeds, or hacking through a corpse, and the film’s snazzy slang and edgy aesthetic calls to mind killer teen movies of the past, from Heathers, to Scream, to Jennifer’s Body, but falls just shy of matching their greatness.
Ever since “Scream” evolved from an affectionate send-up of horror genre tropes into a genuine money-minting franchise, there have been nearly as many tongue-in-cheek slasher movie homages as actual slasher movies, all too many of which were content to simply mimic the idiosyncrasies of their Reagan Era influences, rather than do something interesting with them.
The deaths range from simple stabbings to elaborate Final Destination-style kills.
It’s more of a compensation for the deaths, outside of one in particular that actually prompts the duo to namedrop Final Destination, playing out in largely unoriginal fashion.
Director Tyler MacIntyre, who cowrote the script, provides the expected genre shoutouts (there's a Final Destination allusion, and Dario Argento gets namechecked), but he doesn't overdo it, opting instead to give the two happy psychopaths at the center of things room to create their own slasher classic.
Surely you got the heroines’ last names, and they have Final Destination and Hannibal as their reference points where Randy and Ghostface had Halloween and Friday the 13th.
People die, for sure, but Final Destination-style.
Screenwriters MacIntyre and Chris Lee Hill infuse the proceedings with wink-wink references to horror-film master Dario Argento and the Final Destination series, among other things, with the principal humor deriving from the amusingly bungled, graphically depicted killings (the battle to the death between the two girls and Big Al in a gym being a gory, slapstick highlight).
To compare Tragedy Girls to the classic Natural Born Killers is obvious, exact, and unnecessary all at once.
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