The Final Girls (2015): written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller; directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson; starring Taissa Farmiga (Max Cartwright), Malin Akerman (Nancy/ Amanda Cartwright), Alexander Ludwig (Chris), Nina Dobrev (Vicki), Alia Shawkat (Gertie), Thomas Middleditch (Duncan), Adam Devine (Kurt), and Angela Trimbur (Tina):
Writer Joshua John Miller is the son of Jason Miller (Damien Karras in The Exorcist and playwright of That Championship Season) and the younger half-brother of actor Jason Patric. He wrote The Final Girls to help process his reaction to his father's death. Jason Miller was a troubled man whose most famous role would always be as Karras. Joshua John Miller maps this onto slasher films, which seems a bit odd, but OK.
The recently orphaned, teen-aged daughter (Taissa Farmiga) of a minor actress (Malin Akerman) best known for her role in a slasher movie called Camp Bloodbath gets pulled, along with several friends, into that same movie because of some vague supernatural shenanigans. Once there, they have to survive while also trying to figure out how to escape. And the daughter tries to reconnect by proxy with her mother through the character in the movie.
I suppose The Final Girls is about as enjoyable as a parody of slasher films can be when that parody is PG-rated. There's little gore and no nudity. There is a lot of metacommentary on horror movies in the tradition of the Scream franchise. And there is a dynamite cast, which helps keeps things moving even when the movie pauses for sentiment and soul-searching. Recommended.
Cottage Country: written by Jeremy Boxen; directed by Peter Wellington; starring Malin Akerman (Cammie Ryan), Tyler Labine (Todd Chipowski), Lucy Punch (Masha), Dan Petronijevic (Salinger Chipowski), Benjamin Ayres (Dov Rosenberg), and Kenneth Welsh (Earl Chipowski) (2013): Ontario's cottage country mostly plays itself in an amiable, occasionally blackly comic bit of horror-satire. Cast against type as a buttoned-down office drone, Tyler Labine is appealing. Malin Akerman, while about 1000 times too attractive for her role as Labine's obsessive girlfriend, also does solid work as an increasingly demented Bridezilla wannabe.
More gore and more laughs would be nice, but I've certainly spent 90 minutes with far worse movies with far bigger budgets. And there's a bit involving the extrication of an ax from someone killed with said ax that's both funny and weirdly authentic. Lightly recommended.
Lone Star: written and directed by John Sayles; starring Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar), Kris Kristofferson (Charlie Wade), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Ron Canada (Otis), Joe Morton (Del), and Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz) (1995): Perhaps the most satisfying of all the films of writer-director John Sayles. While the backbone of its plot is a fairly traditional mystery, that mystery allows Sayles to move back and forth across a gulf of 40 years as Chris Cooper's Sheriff of a small Texas border town investigates a murder linked to his late father, the much beloved former sheriff of the town.
Sayles assembles a fine cast and gives them lots to work with. As in most of Sayles's films, there are very few villains -- in this case, exactly one, Kris Kristofferson's odious sheriff, seen in flashbacks to the late 1950's, when Chris Cooper's father was a young deputy played by Matthew McConaughey.
Several plots intertwine over the course of the movie, all of them tied into the murder plot because in this small town, everything is connected. And while Cooper tries to figure out this particular bit of the past, the larger history of Texas, particularly Texas in regards to race relations, also gets argued over in local politics and in a meeting of parents with the school over its "controversial" attempt to offer something other than a valedictory to white people during history classes. In all, it's a fine piece of writing, directing, and acting, true to its genre antecedents but also grasping at something larger than just the solution to a mystery. Highly recommended.
