Tragedy Girls (2017)
4/10
The characters aren't the only ones without a conscience
16 February 2018
"Tragedy Girls" is an odd and unpleasant movie. The characters are too repulsive to care about, but you could at least laugh at them, but the movie doesn't seem to want us to do that. Are we supposed to be impressed by them? Regard them as heroes? Hope for their downfall? What?

The violence in the movie is so ridiculous and over-the-top that it definitely seems to fit the mould of a horror comedy. But there's no other comedy in it. The plot would have been an almost ideal set-up for a satire of today's social media obsessed youth, but the movie avoids any and all opportunities for social commentary.

It keeps you at arm's length from its characters - which will probably be okay with you, honestly - but then at the end seems to expect you to care for them. I didn't.

The ending would be quite bleak in a movie with a social conscience, but this movie has none, so it's more confusing than anything.

The plot: two teenage girls have a blog called "Tragedy Girls" in which they report on local tragedies and are dying for likes - as are, apparently, the people they write about. At the film's beginning, they set-up a poor (?) ugly teenage boy to meet his demise at the hands of a local slasher, and inexplicably take the slasher hostage. Apparently they have an empty warehouse somewhere all to themselves where they can detain serial killers and cut up bodies and nobody knows about it. They don't get many more likes from these escapades so they start killing people themselves.

That is basically it. Aside from a few creative death scenes - which, admittedly, use the horror-comedy trope of bodies being about as fragile as wax figurines - there's nothing else in the movie, really. This is one of few films where the plot description on IMDB tells you everything that happens in the whole movie.

Because it's a movie about two friends, of course there's an unnecessary diversion where they have a falling out and then make up, but that's about it.

The movie, ultimately, left a bad taste in my mouth. A topic like this cries out for comedy, insight, satire, anything. I think the filmmakers just had no idea how to handle it; it's a social commentary story forced into a horror-comedy film.
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