“Tragedy Girls fits best on a weeknight in October when you’ve already watched the good horror movies leading up to Halloween.”
Tragedy Girls is a movie that you probably don’t know about, haven’t seen ads for, and will have a tough time finding but if it comes on Netflix or Amazon Prime and you need to kill 90 minutes? You could do much worse. The film is a solid attempt at satire of high school, social media, and horror movies. It also contains some legitimately dark humor that really shocked me at first because I knew nothing about the film going in. I need to set the plot a bit in order to discuss the movie further.
Two friends, Sade and McKayla run a social media account that focuses on being crime reporters and getting scoops about crimes. Their biggest case is a serial killer and once they catch the killer, rather than turn the killer in, they hold the killer hostage and kill people on their own for the scoops. This allows for a ton of mayhem, blood, and pitch black humor about the “teen slasher” genre. The girls’ constant goal is to become famous and more relevant and that area is mined excessively as they commit so many heinous acts.
The opening of the movie had me ready to fall asleep as two teens were about to get attacked by a serial killer but it was just a trap by the Tragedy Girls to capture the killer and learn from him because they are his biggest fans. At that point I perked up and watch intently. I’d argue that this movie felt like Scream a little bit in the way it deconstructed the tropes of the genre but still hung on to them for dear life at times. This movie is filled with some really good moments but I’m not sure they added up to enough in the end. As far as gore and scares, Tragedy Girls will deliver your absolute worst fear about wood shop class but beyond that it was nothing you haven’t seen before.
The cast was full of most unknowns (at least to me) the two leads were very good and were no doubt one casting call away from starring in the next CW hour long drama. After the movie I went to see what they were in and one was Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse and the other was the girl with the shaved head in Deadpool. The loser from The Hunger Games is in this and Craig Robinson has a few moments of screen time which is always welcome to me and his presence helped sell the strangest scene of the movie where he argues with one of the girls. (I forgot which name goes with which girl!)
I wouldn’t say you need to go out and hunt for Tragedy Girls. However, when it hits a streaming service it will be a much more fun and different take than your typical horror/comedy so it’d be worth seeing if that’s what you are in the mood for. I think it fits best on a weeknight in October when you’ve already watched the good horror movies leading up to Halloween.