And so we have arrived at the end of B-Movie Enema’s Camp Crappabuttawipe…

2015’s The Final Girls comes to us from director Todd Strauss-Schulson, making his second big-screen feature film. Strauss-Schulson comes from a comedy background, having previously made A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. In the four years between those two films, he largely worked on sitcoms. The Final Girls most definitely is something of a love letter to 80s slasher films that took place at a summer camp, but it’s also a comedy and has something a little more going for it than the typical slasher genre film. So it makes sense that he’s helming this film.

I think the horror element definitely comes from the writers, M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. While these two are partners in real life, they are also writing and producing partners. They also created the TV Series Queen of the South, which ran for 62 episodes over the course of five years. Miller, though, is the one who is clearly bringing the heart to the film’s concept.

Joshua John Miller’s film career began as an actor. We’ve covered two of his films. He was Dr. Challis’s son in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, as well as the most memorable part of Teen Witch – the precocious little brother, Richie. Miller got into acting likely due to his father, actor Jason Miller. Jason Miller’s big claim to fame was as Father Karras in The Exorcist. That film earned the elder Miller an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Jason Miller was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright even before appearing in The Exorcist. Largely, Jason Miller stayed out of roles that came anywhere near as high-profile as Karras.

Along with Joshua, Jason also had another son, Jason Patric, a quite popular actor who still gets pretty high-profile work today. Naturally, Jason Patric’s big breakthrough was in the cult classic 1987 film, The Lost Boys. Joshua followed his dad’s writing roots more than acting. But it was the spectre of Father Karras that has long haunted Joshua.

“I grew up watching my dad in The Exorcist, and there’s something haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film. But it’s something that also becomes iconic, and we tried to deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance, but your second chance was inside of a movie?” Miller mused to Christopher McKittrick at Creative Screenwriting.

I wanted to pull that quote directly from the Wikipedia page for The Final Girls and link to that interview at Creative Screenwriting because I think Joshua John Miller hasn’t just done one movie that ties back to his father’s most famous film role. Later, Fortin and Miller, with Miller in the director’s seat, wrote the 2024 horror film The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe. It’s very obvious that the movie, featuring a strained relationship between a daughter and her actor father, is more of Miller trying to reconcile some elements of his father’s life and his place in this household, where there is a brilliant playwright and a solid actor who had some personal vices that probably helped muddy some sense of how an outsider would view him versus how his children might see him. Add to that, the son being haunted by his father’s performance and demise in one of the most famous films ever and the father not really being able to escape the shadow of that incredibly famous movie… I think there is quite a bit to mine here.

The Final Girls premiered at South by Southwest in the spring of 2015 before appearing on the festival circuit throughout the rest of the spring and into the summer. By October of that year, it was released direct-to-digital, but ended up doing particularly well on home video. It’s often considered, by folks like Matt Draper, to be a must-watch Friday the 13th-inspired film. And, if I’m being honest, it’s Draper, and his commentary about this movie in a video about those “almost Friday the 13th movies” that got me to want to watch The Final Girls and do Camp Crappabuttawipe as a whole. So, thanks, Matt, ya dang freak, you!

Alright, so once more into the sacred ground of Camp Crappabuttawipe, my Enemaniacs!

The movie opens with a trailer for a slasher film that features a killer named Billy and the excellent line from the narrator, “They won’t be singing Kumbaya… They’ll be singing Kum…Ba…NOOOOOO!” This movie, 1986’s Camp Bloodbath, stars Amanda Cartwright as Nancy. She’s played by the stunningly gorgeous Malin Ackerman. It’s been 20 years since she appeared in Camp Bloodbath, and she is still acting. Buuuut she’s struggling a bit. She’s been typecast as a scream queen.

Amanda tells her daughter, Max, that if she ever becomes an actress, never do a slasher movie because that’s all anyone will know her from. Amanda’s finances and love life are not exactly doing that great. She was dating a guy who said they were exclusive, but seemingly took off without fulfilling a promise of a romantic getaway. Max is not so much worried about some lame dudes who have gone missing from her mom’s life. She’s more concerned about the bills. While Max is mature and trying to make sure they have a roof over their heads, Amanda is charmed by her daughter taking care of her when it should be the other way around.

However, tragedy strikes. While mom and daughter rock out to Kim Carnes’ “Betty Davis Eyes,” Max accidentally spills her drink on Amanda’s headshots. Reacting off the cuff, Amanda exclaims that those are really expensive to get printed. This causes her to take her eyes off the road, and the car is sideswiped. The car tumbles, leading to Amanda being killed.

Three years later, Max is an orphan and is carrying on in a pretty deep state of depression, and carrying some guilt about what happened. She is now living with her aunt, but spends a lot of time watching old home movies of when she was younger and with her mom. Max is played by Taissa Farmiga, the younger sister of Vera. Both of the Farmiga sisters have carved out quite a nice little niche in the horror game, what with Vera appearing in several films in The Conjuring franchise, as well as playing Norma Bates on Bates Motel, and Taissa appearing in two films in The Nun series and multiple seasons of American Horror Story.

And, yes, I am utterly shocked that both Farmigas played in films within the Conjuring franchise (The Nun is a spinoff of those movies), yet Taissa never played a younger version of Vera’s Lorraine Warren.

Max is trying to carry on with her life as normally as possible, but while studying with her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame) and Chris (Alexander Ludwig, who appeared in this and another movie in 2015 called Final Girl), Gertie’s step-brother, Duncan, barges in looking for Max. Why? Well, because he’s a movie nerd and a group he’s part of recently got their hands on Camp Bloodbath and Camp Bloodbath 2. When he let it slip that his sister’s best friend happens to be the daughter of Amanda Cartwright, well, they are desperate to have her attend the screening.

Max has been avoiding Duncan for a couple reasons. One, why would she want to celebrate her mother’s life, one that was cut tragically short, by watching the movie that Amanda bemoaned as the one that ruined all her future opportunities in acting? Two, Duncan is played by Thomas Middleditch, and she’s probably just as annoyed as I was by his Verizon commercials.

Can you hear me now? Yes, I can, motherfucker. Can you hear my fist in your face?

What makes this all the more painful and awkward is that this screening is happening on the anniversary of the accident. But on the brighter side of this unfortunate event, Chris, a popular, cool, almost kinda jocky dude, is into Max. Chris has recently broken up with Vicki (Nina Dobrev), and she’s here at the screening being annoyingly clingy with Chris. So we have met all our main characters as the movie is getting started.

The screening begins, and we get the basic plot of Camp Bloodbath. The movie within the movie is about Billy Murphy, a tall and kind of awkward kid. Everyone picked on him. In 1957, there was a very mean prank pulled on him involving a large firecracker being tossed into the outhouse that Billy was locked inside.

Meanwhile, inside the movie theater auditorium, there are shenanigans that are about to turn this screening into a nightmare. One guy lights up a joint. Another guy drops a bottle of booze that rolls all the way down to the front of the theater. When the hot ash from the joint hits the trail of booze, it ignites the theater. Duncan tells Max that there is an exit behind the screen, and he, Max, Chris, Vicki, and Gertie escape through that while the theater burns.

The combination of the screening, the joint, the booze, the fire, and the anniversary of Amanda’s death did something weird. It transported our five primary characters into the world of the movie itself – specifically, at the beginning of the movie when the main counselor characters are driving to Camp Bluefin. This leaves most of our cast confused. But Duncan is so surprised, he calls one of the characters by her name (Tina). Though I gotta say, no one is more confused and surprised than Alia Shawkat. She’s really giving some good facial business here

Chris thinks maybe they are dreaming. Vicki tries to determine that they all saw the same thing. Max believes she’s having a psychotic break. 92 minutes later, the five of them are still wandering around trying to figure out where they are and what happened. Gertie wonders if they died and are now in heaven, but Vicki says it can’t be heaven because Max is Jewish. Maybe it’s Jewish heaven?

The characters from Camp Bloodbath drive up again. They stop to ask if they know the way to Camp Bluefin, just as they did when Max and her friends first stepped into the movie’s world. Duncan gets an idea. He sets his watch to go off in another 92 minutes. When it does, the van arrives again, asking for directions. Instead of looking at the counselors from Camp Bloodbath like dumbfounded morons, Duncan says he can show them the way to the camp if the counselors can give them a ride there.

While Duncan can lead conversations that repeat lines from the movie, it’s only a matter of time before Max comes face-to-face with the younger, much more alive version of her mother playing the role of Nancy, the heroine of Camp Bloodbath.

This is a great scene that has a surprisingly heartfelt moment. Seeing her mother again immediately brings tears to her eyes. However, “Nancy” is surprisingly more like Amanda than you might think. She speaks to Max with a soft tone. She asks if it’s the younger woman’s first time away from home and comments on how it’s hard the first time being without parents. It’s very soft, sweet, and motherly. It plays exceptionally well and brings a whole other dimension to the relationship between mother and daughter… as well as actor and most famous role.

We’ll most definitely continue to circle back around that later. For now, Max and Gertie think it’s probably best to GTFO. Maybe for different reasons. Obviously, this is pretty heavy shit for Max. For Gertie, a lot of people are going to be stalked, hacked, and slashed in the extremely near future. This, of course, is exciting for Duncan. He knows exactly when and where these people will be killed. Most importantly, everyone who has sex in the movie dies.

That will include Nancy, which, of course, means Max would have to see her mother die a second time.

Let’s talk about the primary characters of Camp Bloodbath for a moment. Nancy is obviously final girl-coded. While we do know she does indeed die because she ends up having sex, she’s sweet and seems to kind of have her head screwed on straight. The guy with her above is Kurt (Adam DeVine). Kurt is amazing. One, he’s wearing a crop top… Look, don’t judge, every guy, myself included, owned at least one sports-related crop top. Mine was a Washington Redskins shirt made from jersey material. It was awesome. I was stylin’.

Anyway, Kurt is the horndog. He speaks almost entirely in ways that are directed at how awesome he is, overly sexual, or belittling someone. He’s clearly a jock and a cool guy… by 1986 standards. The way he dresses and acts is so far out of time, 30 years later, that he comes off as extremely cringy and kind of dorky. The third person was the girl who was always asking for directions to Camp Bluefin, Tina. She’s the overtly sexy one. She comments on only packing a bikini because outside of that and the clothes she was wearing, she gets naked… a lot.

The first plan to get away from everything that will go down and try to find a way out of this movie is to borrow Kurt’s van and simply drive away. Kurt only agrees to let them borrow his van if they can find the keys he’s tossed into a field several yards away. Meanwhile, another plan starts to form in Max’s mind. While talking to Nancy, she learns that Nancy wants to have sex with Kurt because she doesn’t want to be a virgin forever. While Max warns that sex could kill her (I mean, quite literally in a horror movie of the era), Nancy isn’t worried. Tina’s already had sex twice today, and she’s totally normal.

Nancy begins to wonder who these five new people are and where they came from. They aren’t on the counselor’s list. What’s more, while the gang is looking for the van keys, the movie starts to happen. And by that, I mean the killings in the movie, you know, the main plot of any 80s slasher, begins.

They watch a girl picking raspberries in the woods. She’s approached by a hunky hiker, the two of them start to flirt in a way that attracts the machete-wielding Billy Murphy. The hiker is killed, followed by the girl. Now, watching people die in a movie is one thing. Watching the people die right in front of you, even if it is the same thing as what they would have seen in the movie, is a whole other story. They react, make noises, have some audible response, and so forth to Billy massacring two people in front of their eyes. However, Billy does not react. He simply stares.

Duncan surmises that Billy won’t kill them because they are not characters in the movie. He doesn’t know what to do with people who aren’t actually part of the rigidly scripted plot of Camp Bloodbath. He even thinks that the “characters” they are interacting with are probably just walking around with corn syrup blood. He tests this theory only to discover that, nope… That’s real blood.

Duncan says that they probably can’t leave until the movie is over. The good news is that, soon, the smoking-hot actual final girl of the movie, Paula, will be arriving. All they need to do is stick with her, and they’ll have the best seats in the house. However, when Duncan decides to take a selfie with Billy, all his theories go out the window because Billy throws his machete at him, killing him.

The other four take off running to get away from Billy. They keep running, but find themselves running in a loop. No matter what direction they go in, they return to the camp. Billy is not their only problem… The movie has them trapped too.

When Paula, the actual final girl, arrives, she’s literally smoking hot. I mean, she’s smoking a cigarette, and she’s wearing a leather jacket, jeans, and boots at a summer camp. That’s gotta be hot. Anyway, they know this is going to be the person who kills Billy. They come up with a plan to try to disrupt the foregone conclusion that everyone here will die. The four of them will stick to a particular counselor. Knowing Billy arrives the moment someone takes off their top, they each will stick with a counselor to prevent anything sexual from happening.

Chris is assigned to Kurt, who pisses Chris off by calling him a “fag” because Chris has two gay dads. Chris tells Kurt that all the women at the camp are busted and there’s no way he’s going to want to have sex. Meanwhile, Vicki is assigned to Tina, the absolutely most uncontrollable libido of the whole camp. Tina can’t even sit still without doing sexy grinding dance moves… against nothing. On the other hand, Vicki also talks to Paula and tells her she knows how things are going to go down at the camp. Naturally, Max is going to take Nancy, who busts in on Nancy’s sex scene with Kurt in the movie.

As for Gertie, she teams up with Blake, but we already know where this is going. He had already commented to the other counselors that he thinks she’s cute. They bond over buttons they are wearing. He asks what’s up with the other guy he saw her with. He means Duncan, her brother. This is all pointing to the two of them ultimately hooking up and being put in Billy’s crosshairs.

Later, Gertie screams when she sees Billy outside the cabin. She tells Max to warn everyone about Billy. This leads to Nancy telling the urban legend about Billy Murphy. There’s a super cool effect that happens as she tells the story. It looks like this goo is seeping down from the ceiling. What it does is change the movie and its world into black and white. It’s a really neat way to transition to and from black and white while having our main characters still interact with the movie, but in a way that keeps them living out what anyone would see in the film.

Everything had been playing out just like the movie originally did. But this is turned on its head after the story ends. When the movie transitions back to color, Gertie has blood on her face from the flashback. The counselors try to run away, but stop when Max explains that they can’t leave until Billy Murphy is dead. Kurt and Paula get into her car and drive away. Duncan emerges into their path, saying he’s not dead, but Paula hits him with her car. This causes her to crash the car into the camp’s sign, ejecting Kurt out of the window to his death. Paula then dies when her car explodes.

So now the movie is broken. Kurt was not killed by Billy. Paula, the only person in the movie who could “kill” Billy, is dead. Max explains to Nancy, Tina, and Blake that they are in a horror movie. Surprisingly, this goes over well. However, with Paula gone, they need to nominate a new final girl. In order to defeat Billy, they need two things. First, they need a virgin. Gertie nominates Max. Second, they need to get Billy’s machete. The virgin, wielding his own weapon, is the only way to destroy Billy.

Nancy says she’s a virgin, and she can take on the role of a final girl. However, Vicki, somewhat tactlessly, tells her that she can’t be. She’s hard-coded in the movie to be the shy girl with the clipboard who has sex and dies. Nancy runs away to cry, realizing there’s nothing to save her. He tells Max that she’s never going to live out her dream of going to college, meeting a man she will fall in love with, marry, and have a little girl she would do anything for. Again, this is a wonderful little heartfelt scene that is unexpected in a horror comedy/slasher parody.

Nancy asks Max what they will do now. Max says, “We fight.”

So that leaves Chris to strategize. It’s no more junior varsity bullshit. It’s time to really come up with a pro plan to take on Billy with “Operation Booby Trap.” Everyone works together to set up some traps, create some weapons, and wait for Billy to come for them. Vicki apologizes for the mean things she’s done to both Gertie and Max. She tells them she knows she’s gonna die because she’s the bitch in an 80s horror movie after the halfway point of the runtime. She makes Max promise to be the courageous one she always used to be.

Between Vicki realizing her shortcomings and reconnecting with old friends and Max offering a chance at a new life to Nancy by asking her to leave with her and go back to the Valley (where she and her mom lived), there’s no shortage of wonderful moments in this movie. I also want to say that even in the tender moments, the movie doesn’t lose its sense of humor. There are still a few funny moments in the scenes with a great deal of heart.

It’s time for Operation Booby Trap to kick off. In the main lodge, they play “Cherry Pie” for Tina to strip to. When she exposes her tits, Billy comes out of the fog toward the lodge. Tina freaks out and runs away too soon. This causes her to trip on the first booby trap, which sends her head into a bear trap. Blake and Gertie cut a rope, sending a log down at Billy, pinning him against a buck’s antlers hanging on the back of the door. Unfortunately, Blake is killed by Billy when he goes to get the machete.

The next part of the plan is to arrow the shit out of Billy with flaming arrows and draw him upstairs. Up there, they will dump flammable liquid onto him to blow him up. The trap doesn’t quite work as planned, which ends up getting both Gertie and Vicki killed. Now, a flaming Billy chases the only remaining characters, Chris, Max, and Nancy.

They are chased through the woods until they are cornered. To get away from them, Max tells Nancy to tell the story of Billy again, thrusting them back into the 1957 flashback. The bullies’ car that pulls up and starts the flashback hits Billy, causing him to drop his machete for Max to pick up. However, when Nancy finishes the flashback, they are back in the present, but Max still has the machete. The only problem? Billy still has a knife and is still nearby. He stabs Chris and takes Nancy.

Max hides Chris in a small chapel. Chris doesn’t want Max to leave him. He tells her that nothing here is real and Nancy was always meant to die. Also… He kinda doesn’t want to die alone. Max, though, won’t lose her mother a second time. She tells Chris that she knows where Billy is taking her. It’s a run-down cabin they saw in the second flashback. Inside, Nancy is tied up, and all the other dead counselors are stored there. While Max unties Nancy, Billy arrives and tosses both girls around. He even manages to stab Max in the stomach before Nancy incapacitates Billy with the machete.

Nancy takes Max to the chapel. She tells her that she knows how to fix things. She is only the shy girl with a clipboard character. She was never meant to survive. Max begs her to not go off to her doom and reveals that Nancy is actually Amanda Cartwright, her mother. She tells Max she has to let her go so she and Chris can survive.

To “Bette Davis Eyes,” Nancy steps out and begins to dance while opening her shirt. Billy arrives and kills her. Max picks up the machete and attacks Billy. Billy tosses Max around a bit, but Max gets some pretty dang good licks on the monster. When Billy throws his knife at her, Max dodges it and decapitates him. With Billy dead on the ground, Max looks into the sky to see the credits rolling.

Max and Chris kiss all the way to the very end of the film reel. The world around them begins to quake and go white. Max wakes up in a hospital bed. Both she and Chris are in the same hospital room. When she opens the curtain, she sees Vicki, Duncan, and Gertie all recovering as well. Vicki tells her they are back at home. Duncan reveals this wasn’t a dream. He shows off his machete wound. Best of all, Max has her friendship bracelet from Nancy.

But not so great… They hear the familiar chant in the soundtrack because a doctor is trying to get fresh with a nurse. Duncan realizes they aren’t just at the hospital, they are in the hospital where the sequel, Camp Bloodbath 2: Cruel Summer, takes place. He’s excited because this one is so much cooler than the original.

The Final Girls is way better than it has any business being. No, fuck that. It’s better than it needs to be. One of my biggest complaints about throwback movies in indie horror is how much more attention is paid to style over substance. I can’t tell you how many horror movies I’ve seen in the indie world that spend so much focus on the 80s clothes, makeup, or music, or putting a bunch of unnecessary film scratches or videotape effects over the images. None of that matters if your plot or characters are shit.

The Final Girls is taking everything into consideration, but with moderation in the style department. Some of the music references are not accurate, but I don’t care. We’re given just enough visual cues to understand Tina has an 80s hairstyle. She and Nancy are dressed like what you’d expect counselors in a camp slasher to be dressed in the era. Kurt is exactly measured to be a thinly written horndog in a horror movie. It’s a parody, but not overdone to the point of feeling obviously written by people chasing nostalgia.

I have to admit, the final moments between Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman had me a little teary-eyed. I loved the two of them together. Akerman is technically playing two different characters, but never once do you not see that mother-daughter chemistry between her and Farmiga. Why is this movie so damn good?!?

Well, honestly, it goes back to something I mentioned earlier in the article. Joshua John Miller, himself, mentioned how bizarre it is to see his father die over and over again anytime he watches The Exorcist. Yes, The Exorcist III kind of retcons that… sort of, but Miller lost his father earlier than most people do in their lives. Jason Miller was known to drink a lot, and I’m sure that made him a somewhat complicated figure in Joshua’s life. Mixing all of that together and understanding what it means to be the offspring of an actor who is very specifically known for a singular role… I think this was a lot of cathartic counseling for Miller. He poured it all into this movie and, yeah. You can really feel that coming through between the characters of Max and Amanda/Nancy.

But beyond that, too, the cast from top to bottom was great. I love that there are, effectively, eight (maybe eight and a half) unique characters. We understand the role each character is playing or occupying in this story. They are ultimately all playing some sort of archetype, but there is not a single character in this movie that I want to see hurt or killed. Even Nina Dobrev’s Vicki, despite being annoying at the start, makes a complete 180 and has her own wonderful moment with Max and Gertie.

Is Tina kinda dumb? Yes, but she’s also fun and doesn’t mean to harm anyone. She just wants to be naked, goddammit. Kurt? Sure, he’s kinda gross, but he just wants to get laid, goddammit. I also love the misdirect of how important it seems Laura is supposed to be, but she’s the one we basically know the least. That was clever. It forces our primary characters from the “real world” to step in and figure out a new ending to the movie. There is no character in this movie that I dislike. I want to hang out with all these people, either in the present day or in 1986.

So… That’s it for Camp Crappabuttawipe. We’ve had some fun, right? We got chased by slashers. We got cloned. We got chased by a slasher killer. We tossed some kids out of vans on the side of the road. We got stalked by a mass killer. We went on a miles-long regatta with our beagle best friend. We even got chased not once, not twice, but three times by a serial-killin’ Angela Baker. Hell, we even discovered what it means to find love and lose our virginity.

It wasn’t the movies we watched, my dear campers… It was the friends we made along the way.

…and the slasher killers we had to run away from.

Next time, it’s back to our regularly scheduled reviews. It also happens to be the 550th review here at B-Movie Enema. Let’s celebrate by visiting some old friends. We’re off to Milwaukee for the RedLetterMedia boys and Space Cop!