At once giddily postmodern and subtly disturbing, this hilarious Gen Y splatter-farce finds two social media-obsessed high school girls fixated on becoming famous when a serial killer moves into town.
Plays like a sweet story of a believable high school friendship between two girls who just happen to be sociopaths.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2017
Tragedy Girls 2017
Sadie and McKayla are high school best friends. The two are social media-obsessed partners in crime, reporting on a serial killing spree in their sleepy midwestern town in the hope of gaining more than 15 minutes of online infamy. When things don’t move fast enough for the ruthlessly ambitious pair, they decide to take matters into their own hands. As the bodies pile up and the girls’ hunger for fame drives a wedge between them, the serial killer on the loose has devious plans of his own.
Deliriously anarchic in its deconstruction of genre, Tragedy Girls will generate much goodwill with horror diehards. With nods to everything from Carrie to Cannibal Holocaust, the film also delivers fantastically gooey practical splatter FX in spades.
Send-ups of horror films have come thick and fast in the 21st century. Whereas Wes Craven (Scream) and others turned the original slasher movies on their head, genre-savvy millennials are now having to out-meta each other with films like Final Girls and Tucker & Dale vs Evil. So it’s refreshing that Tyler MacIntyre’s debut feature avoids Xeroxing the competition. It’s one of the funniest horror comedies since Jason and the Mean Girls went to see Clueless together. — AT