Movie Review — ‘Tragedy Girls’

I like horror movies, especially when there is a unique twist around its subject matter. Tragedy Girls tackles the slasher genre and spins it around on the audience that results in bloody murders, social media posts to gain notoriety and attempts at comedy that can be either a hit or a miss. Director Tyler MacIntyre and his co-writer Chris Lee Hill (both of whom worked on Patchwork) introduce to us to two high school girls who have a thing for murder and love being in the center of attention with their social media coverage. It’s an interesting take albeit a lackluster one.

McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) and Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) are enjoying their high school lives. They serve on the committee that oversees the upcoming prom dance and all the while a series of grisly murders are taking place. It’s a familiar tale but Tragedy Girls offers a different look. McKayla and Sadie lure an actual killer named Lowell (Kevin Durand) and capture him. They want to learn all about his style; how to kidnap someone, how to dispose of a body and so forth. The beginning starts out great and we see these two girls are up to something.

Everyone at their high school is worried about the string of murders that is occurring in this small knit community, meanwhile, McKayla and Sadie are posting about missing people all over their Twitter page at #TragedyGirls. Here is where the film started to lose interest. Tragedy Girls has a clever twist but the characters that we follow in this film are so mean-spirited that I didn’t feel for them when they became sad or even had feeling for someone. These girls are sociopaths and have no regard for the people that themselves murder, I don’t see the comedy element of sharing social media posts of murder and how that’s supposed to make the audience laugh. Every character that we find interesting is killed off and nothing is unique about it.

Verdict 1 out of 5

Despite the great performances from its main stars, Tragedy Girls isn’t funny and features brutal violence that is off-putting. The characters that we follow are so cruel that I wanted them to kill each other or maybe someone else would. Tragedy Girls fails in the satire that it’s trying to mock with the slasher genre that Scream did so successful with. Perhaps the new generation of movie-goers can appreciate the social media angle, but for myself, it was a complete bore that felt uninspired and lazy in its execution.