Tragedy Girls (5 Stars)

Apparently "Tragedy Girls" is unoriginal. That's what critics wrote when it came out in 2017. It's supposedly just a knock-off of those 1990's teen slashers.

Well, yes. It does look remarkably like a 1990's teen slasher.

That's the point.

McKayla and Sadie are two teenage girls who're obsessed with social media, popularity and serial killers. When they get the opportunity to learn from a serial killer, they use him to improve their own murderous careers. Because apparently getting good grades and going to university isn't ambitious enough.

The clever thing is that the film doesn't tell the story from the point of view of the victims. McKayla and Sadie are the slashers. We follow their plans, their friendship, their arguments and their increasingly elaborate murders. We sympathise with the two girls, We want to see them get away with murder.

And they do.

Most slasher films have a Final Girl. Tragedy Girls has two Final Killers.

The film eventually builds towards a prom massacre in which 124 students are killed. That's quite a lot of dead teenagers, even by slasher standards. And while everyone else is having a terrible evening, McKayla and Sadie are having the time of their lives.

Then they escape.

It's a remarkably audacious reversal of the genre. The film takes virtually every familiar teen-slasher convention and uses it for the benefit of the people who would normally be trying to avoid it. The teenagers are there. The high school is there. The killer is there. The gruesome deaths are there. The prom is there. The social-media obsession is there.

It's just that we've somehow ended up supporting the wrong people.

And that's why I find the criticism that the film is "unoriginal" so strange. Of course it's copying the conventions of 1990's teen slashers. It's deliberately copying them. The originality comes from what it does with them. Rather than parodying the genre from the outside, it moves the protagonists to the other side of the knife.

It also works surprisingly well as a straight slasher. There are plenty of kills, the film has a good sense of pace and it uses music much more effectively than the recent Scream films. It doesn't have quite the soundtrack presence of Scream 1-3, but at least the film remembers that a slasher benefits from having some music.

And then there's that ending. McKayla and Sadie are heading off to college, ready to begin a new chapter. In other words, they're going to college to get an education in serial murder.

Unfortunately, that's where the story ends.

I was lucky enough to see "Tragedy Girls". It never really got the general cinema release it deserved. It went straight to video in most countries and only had a tiny theatrical release in the US. A sequel was clearly being contemplated, but it never happened.

Which is a genuine shame, because the college sequel could have been wonderful. Put these two completely amoral teenage serial killers into a new environment with hundreds of fresh victims and give them four years to work on their social-media strategy. What's the worst that could happen?

Quite a lot.

It's a brilliant film, in my opinion the best slasher film of the last 25 years.

And if you think it's just a knock-off of 1990's teen slashers, you should watch it again.

This time, pay attention.