Tragedy Girls (5 Stars)

This is a film that I can't watch too often. At the moment, anyway. Maybe I'll binge on it too much and get sick of it eventually, but that date is still far off. I wish there could be a "Tragedy Girls 2", but it wasn't successful enough to justify a sequel. Why not? It's the fault of the distributors. If more people had been given a chance to see it when it was released last year it would have been a box office smash.

Strangely enough, "Tragedy Girls" has a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I say strangely, because Rotten Tomatoes usually gives the best films poor ratings. The critics are out of touch with what film fans want to see. This time they got it right. "Tragedy Girls" is a special kind of film. It builds on the teen slasher films of the 1990's while injecting the genre with enough new ideas to please even the most cynical critics.

Don't Sadie and McKayla make a beautiful couple? One of the film's taglines is "Girls who slay together stay together". That's catchy. To make it true we need a series of films about their antics. The first film ends with them leaving high school, but they can go on killing at college.

In my previous reviews I've concentrated on Brianna Hildebrand, the actress who plays Sadie, because I know her from the Deadpool films. Today I was reminded that Alexandra Shipp contributes just as much to the film in her role as McKayla. She's an actress I hardly know, even though she appears in "X-Men: Apocalypse" as Storm. I wouldn't have recognised her if I hadn't been told first. I'd like to see her in other films to get a better feeling for her.

I don't approve of film piracy, I never have done, but in this case I want to spread the word about the film in any way I can. I feel tempted to make a dozen DVD copies of "Tragedy Girls" and hand them out to anyone who hasn't yet seen it. I know that would be wrong, but I'm tempted.