A Hell of a Night

Slasher movies should be scary. They exist within the horror genre and, as such, should reflect the needs and expectations of that genre. And if they don’t, then at the very least the film should have some express reason for why the movie isn’t scary. If it’s a comedy playing in the tropes and style of the slasher genre (like the first Scary Movie), then that’s fair. You aren’t really a slasher, technically, but we can still understand the angle you’re coming at. If you aren’t making a scary slasher than at the very least you need to make a funny one.

Tragedy Girls, the comedic slasher flick released in 2017, doesn’t really hit either mark. It’s a film that was clearly designed as an inversion of the slasher tropes, one where the seeming “final girls” of the film are actually the slasher killers all along (I’d say this was a spoiler but it’s revealed in the very first scene of the film). This is a great idea in concept as it could allow for the film to really explore the genre from a whole new angle. Dark and funny and weird, that’s what this concept promises… except the film never actually delivers on these promises. It’s neither scary nor funny, sitting somewhere between the two in such a way that it can’t muster the energy of either. It’s a film that, in a way, actually feels surprisingly bland despite its interesting horror movie concept.

The town is Rosedale, a Midwestern little slice of life, and there’s a killer on the loose. No one in town thinks there’s a slasher taking out teens except for McKayla Hooper (Alexandra Shipp) and Sadie Cunningham (Brianna Hildebrand). They hatch a plan to lure out and capture the murderer, Lowell Orson Lehmann (Kevin Durand). This isn’t so they can put an end to the murders, or so they can be seen as some kind of heroes. No, these two girls are obsessed with murder and they want Lowell to train them in the ways of being a slasher icon. Understandably, after getting tied up and imprisoned by the girls, he tells them to get stuffed.

So they head out on their own, plotting their own spree of slashings that they can then, eventually, blame on Lowell. They plot the death of McKayla’s ex-boyfriend, Toby (Josh Jutcherson), and execute it well enough, but when the police get involved they chalk it up to an accident. They then execute the murder of type-A Queen Bee cheerleader Syl (Savannah Jayde), and while the police do call this one a murder, due to its grisly scene, they don’t think there’s a slasher on the loose. McKayla and Sadie need the town to embrace the idea that a killer is on the loose, especially so the girls can drive hits to their Tragedy Girls website and social media accounts. In fact the only person that believes them is Jordan (Jack Quaid), son of the sheriff, but even he begins to suspect something darker and more foul might be going on with these two girls.

Going back to my starting statement for this review, a slasher needs to either be scary or funny to work. Tragedy Girls isn’t scary, but I don’t think it was meant to be in any way, shape, or form. It’s pitched as a comedy horror, and most of the sequences of killing and death in the film are staged in a way to make them funny, not scary. The film doesn’t want you having nightmares over its kills, or thinking anything in the movie isn’t amusing, so it goes out of its way to actually dull and blunt the effect of the kills we do get in the movie.

This does the film a disservice, though, because the best way to amp up humor in a horror film is to contrast it with good scares. We’ve discussed this before, in other slasher reviews, but there’s a fine balance to the genre. You have to build anticipation for the scares, letting the tension ramp up and up, and then sometimes you release it with a scare, or a kill, but other times the tension is released with a joke. This actually helps to keep the audience on their toes, though, and ready to be scared because they won’t know if the next release will be amusing or horrible. You need that finely controlled tension.

Because Tragedy Girls doesn’t go hard on its horror, the comedy aspect doesn’t play out as well, either. Cracking a corny joke or going for a pratfall situation in a scene that should be horrifying only works if you’ve built the tension to get us to that point. But Tragedy Girls, in the way it’s set up and filmed, doesn’t know how to build that tension to execute scares, and it always goes for the laugh, leading to scenes of killings that have no impact on the people watching them. It just doesn’t work.

In fact, none of the comedy really works for me. I didn’t find the movie especially funny, even in the sequences where the girls aren’t killing and are just being themselves. The movie goes for a kind of Heathers vibe, hoping to poke light at the dark deeds these girls are planning, but I just didn’t find anything they said or did especially funny. Everything felt very flat, very basic to me, and I have to put much of that blame Tyler MacIntyre, the writer/director of the film, because I just didn’t feel like he understood how to craft this kind of movie.

Not that I think the fault lines completely with MacIntyre. I also think the leads were miscast as well. Of the two, Brianna Hildebrand does the worse job. Her character is the head of homecoming planning, a cheerleader, deeply involved in student government, but the way Hildebrand plays her you don’t know why she’d be involved in any of that. She’s withdrawn, reserved, outwardly hostile to everyone. She clearly wants everyone dead, and it shows. There’s nothing of the bubbly facade she should be wearing for this character to cover for the murder in her eyes. She doesn’t play the part well at all.

Alexandra Chipp does slightly better as she at least is able to do the fake, bouncy and bubbly persona her character should have. Here, though, I feel like she doesn’t quite nail the tone. She can get her character to feel engaged, but she plays her like an airhead that has to be led around by her friend. Now, that’s actually a plot point of the movie, with McKayla feeling like Sadie doesn’t take her seriously, but to sell that you actually have to have depth in your character’s performance. Shipp feels fake and plastic (ironic when, just a few years later she’d play actual fake and plastic character, Writer Barbie).

The worst casting of the film, though, is Jack Quaid. I like the actor and I actually feel like, for the part written, he can’t act the shit out of his character. The problem is that Jack Quaid, at the time of this movie’s release, was 27 and he looked it. He’s too old to play a character still in high school, by a wide margin. The fact that he was the love interest for Sadie (whose actress is five years younger) makes it even worse. “What’s this teen doing dating an older man? Shouldn’t someone say something?” I get that movies tend to cast adults in teen roles, but you can take it too far. I felt like he should be talking to her about hair loss and needing to watch his cholesterol while they were out on dates. It was a bad look all around.

Suffice it to say that I couldn’t get into Tragedy Girls. I really wanted to as I thought the setup for the film was interesting. In execution, though, this film falls very flat. It’s bland and boring and doesn’t have nearly as much to say about the slasher genre as it leads you to believe. But, worst of all, it’s just not fun. This movie could have been a real killer, but it just falls flat.