TRAGEDY GIRLS

#ContainsSpoilers

I don't really get social media. I mean, I do have a small online presence, and I occasionally get a "like" or a retweet, but mostly I use it to keep in some kind of virtual touch with people I know and pimp my bloglinks like this one (to no real effect, I should add). The idea of living and measuring your life by how many total strangers uptick and forward your contributions to the infinity of hashtags and forums and upper case bellowing, no matter how banal or ignorant or incorrectly spelled, seems to me no more logical than rating and ranking people by their shoe size or what they're allergic to.

Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand - a magnificent name in itself) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are the Tragedy Girls: a couple of vapid, empty, soulless high school teenagers with a vapid, empty, soulless podcast thing about death and serial killers, even as an actual serial killer is active in the area. In a surprise opening, the girls capture and imprison him, but it's all part of a grand plan to continue his work for the benefit of higher ratings for their show and their own personal fame. But the hint of romance between Sadie and their editor/technical whizz (Jack Quaid) - who also happens to be the son of the local Sheriff - might break the team up. And then the serial killer escapes...

The two girls' surnames are Cunningham and Hooper, ticking off two slasher franchises immediately, and the serial killer's surname is Lehmann because there's a heavy dose of Heathers and high school clique movies in there as well. But yet again, yet again, there's absolutely no-one to root for or empathise with, no story arc worth following, nothing to connect with under the surface. That surface may be pretty and glossy and colourful, but yet again there's absolutely no reason why I should care. I ended up looking for interest in the supporting characters - like the bespectacled Plain Jane on the Prom Committee - because I wasn't getting anything from any of the leads.

There's an absence of morality that makes Tragedy Girls hard to stomach and harder to enjoy, and the cheery tone of its casual murders sits oddly with the idea that we're supposed to like or admire McKayla or Sadie. Granted that it's brash and slick and heavy on the splattery gore, and there is some satire in there about the social media obsessions of the millennial generation, but the film seems to want to be a celebration rather than a condemnation when there's nothing to celebrate and everything to condemn. Their final body count is ahead even of Jason's or Freddy's whole franchises, and the cheeriness of it all left me wondering what the point was, and why we're expected to want to spend the evening in the company of such appalling individuals. I didn't, and found it an increasingly uncomfortable watch with no heart. Presumably that's what it set out to be, in which case: congratulations. I really found it hard to stomach.

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