Premise: Two high school girls, hoping to get attention for their murder vlog, create a panic around town by committing murders previously done by their local serial killer.
At the end of the day, Tragedy Girls is the kind of movie that's designed to be watched with a crowd of people at a midnight screening somewhere (which its festival screening schedule confirms). You really need a group of people cheering as petite actresses kill Josh Hucherson as a motorcycle douchebag to distract you from the aspects of the movie that don't really track.
This movie has a lot of the goods. Brianna Hildebrand and Alexandra Shipp are bult in Aubrey Plaza's image. Especially Hildebrand, who is best known for being the April Ludgate of the Marvel universe in the Deadpool movies. Come to think of it Shipp was in an X-Men movie too. I wonder if there's a connection there? Regardless, they embody that male horror fan fantasy of the cheerleaders who also love murder and gore (There's probably no need to examine the psychology of that though). To be fair, it's not just weird fetishizing. There's something funny about that contrast too. I know it was entertaining seeing tiny Shipp and Hildebrand try to take down Craig Robinson. The two leads deliver a lot of the silly, extreme lines well. The key part to their casting is that they each can believably be the one in the pair who is actually a sociopath or the one who has a heart and eventually reforms. It makes the way the movie plays out even more successful.
The movie gets bonus points for creative deaths and being gory without being too disgusting. In other words, when they are cutting up bodies, it looked just fake enough that I didn't have to think about the moral implications of anything. I enjoyed the dark sense of humor. For some reason, my favorite joke was the running gag about the missing pets that the girls killed to practice their craft. Hildebrand's dad screaming "We want our missing pets" in the middle of a town hall meeting about a serial killer had me in stitches.
I was bothered by the inclusion of the actual serial killer for so much of the movie. They had to know he would escape at some point. If they were really such obsessives about this kind of stuff, you'd think that securing the serial killer would've been much more of a priority. I'm still trying to figure out if their plan for prom was the end game all along or if that was an opportunity that just presented itself. It's haphazard if that was actually a masterplan, although it would explain why they kept the original serial killer alive the whole time.
Side Thought: Was Dylan Gelula busy or did they not want to pair her with Hildebrand again after First Girl I Loved? While Hildebrand and Shipp work really well together in this, not getting Gelula feels like a missed opportunity.
General Query: This is the smallest of small things to pick at, but aren't party streamers flame retardant? In college, my friends and I liked to burn things because, who doesn't. One thing we were surprised to learn was that the cheap party streamers we had were flame retardant. Smart for safety, but really boring for people who wanted to see stuff engulfed in flames. From then on, I assumed all party streamers were flame retardant? Was I wrong, or did the production of this movie have to go out of their way to find flammable streamers? Weirdly, when I google "non-flame retardant streamers", I only get results for flame retardant streamers, and now I want to know.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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