Amusing film-in-film horror comedy with a pretty fresh premise and good acting. Unfortunately, even within the movie's logic, not everything makes sense. You can see past that and have a decent time anyway, and there are some very fun ideas and insane camera angles. Other ideas are brushed over a little half-assed. Overall a decent attempt that could have turned into a classic with a little more care.

The 'Last Action Hero' of slasher movies, 'The Final Girls' is a giddy, cunningly funny spoof of slice-and-dice campfire tales. One area of contention for devotees of Friday the 13th and other films of its ilk is that the studio has neutered the rating to a PG-13. However, I found the suppression of gratuitous splatter and nudity to be refreshing after Turbo Kid and Deathgasm. Its innocence is almost wholesome in retrospect. Surprisingly, the film contains a poignant emotional hook with Max (Taissa Farmiga) reuniting with her deceased mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) inside the film-within-the-film. You truly want them to surmount the subgenre's conventions. Speaking of clichés, the screenwriters astutely skewer the correlation between promiscuity and imminent death, the jock's sex-starved innuendos ("I'm a cherry stealer") and the deformed villain's revenge for a traumatizing prank years ago. The film is chockfull of ripe one-liners ("I can't believe we're about to casually watch someone die? What is this? Detriot?") and the faux 1986 Grindhouse trailer with the digital film scratches and cheesy logline ("They'll be singing 'Kum Ba NOOOO'!") is worthy of inside-baseball chuckles. Most films that culminate with a stinger for a sequel usually elicit groans from me, but the lockstep succession into Camp Bloodbath II is both internally logical and enticing due to the film's already stellar quality. For a stroll down the path of meta humor, I would gladly watch the self-reflexively hilarious The Final Girls over the overrated Scream canon any day.