Tragedy Girls

The format and plot of this movie is so obviously inspired by Heathers. That was a dark, twisted social satire about popularity, using murder (disguised as suicide) and tragedy to amplify the absurdity of high school and the desire to be popular. It remains an incredible movie, with a whip-smart script, delightful direction, and an amazing cast. This is a horrible piece of shit, an insult to Heathers in every possible way, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Heathers great. One of the things that made Heathers great was that, even though JD was a total lunatic, he was still imbued with an essence of cool. And to balance out the toxicity of Heathers, there was Veronica, trying to balance the desire to be popular and her moral compass. Tragedy Girls doesn’t understand this. Their two leads are a pair of fame-seeking, shallow sociopaths who are trying to get famous with a Twitter feed following a supposed murderer in their town. Of course, they ARE the murderers. They’re not funny, they’re not clever, they’re not engaging; they’re the worst kind of Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian famous-for-being-famous talentless shitbags that nobody likes. The movie doesn’t even bother giving them a reason why they’re evil; they just are, which robs them of any depth. They seem to love horror movies, comparing and referencing them constantly … except when the movie needs them to be dumb (one girl can’t say Dario Argento’s name and doesn’t even know who he is), but it doesn’t amount to anything; none of the kills reference the movies, and their knowledge doesn’t pay off in any way. In any other horror movie, they’d be the first to die, and you’d cheer as they get pitchforked. Here, though, you’re stuck with these fucking trash-bag wastes of skin for 90 minutes as everything keeps breaking their way. There is no one to cheer for, no one to rally behind. You just want to slap these two brats. Repeatedly. With golf clubs. Another failing is that Heathers had wry social commentary built into it. This does not. At no point does it try to examine WHY they desperately want fame. For a brief shining moment about 45 minutes in, a teacher calls them out on their shallow, narcissistic, parasitic behavior, but the scene ends before it can make a point, because heaven forbid we have any actual thought in this movie. It’s as vacuous and shallow as phony as the leads are, and it doesn’t even seem to care. Not one moment before or one moment after that brief oasis of sanity does the movie show any care about being anything deeper than a Tik Tok video. It’s insulting how lazy and pointless this movie is. And then there’s the ending. Fuck me sideways, this ending. After the movie has the temerity to use the third-act fight (complete with a sad music montage!!!), it then culminates at the prom (I’m getting a migraine just thinking about the laziness), where, in the span of no more than 10 minutes, the girls have a climactic argument, confront the serial killer they’ve been using as a pawn (which is a storyline that really never went anywhere anyway) and kill him, make up, chain the doors shut, and burn everybody alive. Yes, they killed everybody at the prom like in Carrie. Plagiarism takes more effort than this. The ending also abandons a terribly ill-conceived attempt to redeem one of the girls. Suddenly, the movie just shrugs, says fuck it, and makes her a psycho again. And then she kills her boyfriend. Because fuck hope. All of that in less than 10 minutes. The FINAL ten minutes too. The ending is in such a rush to happen, it’s like the movie knows it has overstayed its welcome and is just scrambling to tie up loose ends before it’s kicked out. The thing is, the ending is a paradox, because it needed another 10-15 minutes to breathe, but another 10-15 minutes would’ve been as intolerable as waterboarding. This isn’t a movie. It’s an elaborate torture. It apes the formula behind something that worked without using or understanding any of the ingredients. It doesn’t even understand that the schadenfreude found in slasher movies is that the killer is dispatching shallow, one-dimensional characters, because here, the killers ARE shallow and one-dimensional, so there’s nothing and no one to latch onto here. It’s just a parade of misery.