Final Girl : La Dernière Proie

As I'm reading, the director Tyler Shields is a photographer and this is his directorial debut.

Well, it shows in both counts. This movie (?) has a direction of photography with extremely bright lights and hard shadows projected on the walls which give a dreamy nightmare-ish feel to the movie. And it is most certainly a "debut" because the director isn't sure about what is doing and how to reach out to the audience.

Abigail Breslin is a girl meant to lure a gang of teenage sociopaths who are killing dozens of young girls in their small community. In a trend that is revived nowadays (summer 2015) the girl is a hardened martial arts specialist trained by an unknown man who lost his wife and daughter. (There is a trend showing tough kids again. Just saw Big Game, Hardly Lethal etc.).

Anyway in terms of entertainment this movie fails to deliver. It may capture you in the beginning. To see the young girl get back to those boys, but the actual scenes are uninteresting.

This looks more like an experiment or a low budget student project than an actual movie. And of course the ending has nothing more to deliver.

Overall: Avoid it. Waste of time.

When the trailer comes out a couple of months ago, i was like, no, they can do that. Another one of thoses revenge flick they made a hundred times. Abigail Breslin stars as Veronica and Wes Bentley is not named and he is her mentor. He teach her (in a young age) to becomes a complete weapon. Which she is like 13 years later now at around 18. The character of Wes Bentley gives her many ''challenge'' and one of them is to approch a group of sadistic teens who killed blond women for unknown reasons. But they are a bunch of rich kids with problem. And they love the hunting season.

The funny thing in this film is the style, it is very stylish, 50s style and it is interesting to see the storyline developp. Sure, they don't look to have 100 millions of budget, but for what they get, they make a great effort and look really convincing. This director, Tyler Shields make his first big screen film and i hope it's not the last.

There's no real set up, the trailer basically summed up the movie. You understand the relationship between the characters but beyond that you don't know much about them. It's nicely executed and overall the movie is watchable but it feels more like a student project with an interesting cast than anything else.

Final Girl is not thrilling or frightening, particularly if you've seen the trailer. The good thing about it is the pace, it has a nice pace but not a very exciting one. So if you have 90 minutes to kill why not watch this movie.

@wornoutspines

This movie had quite a lot of familiar names for me and with all those names should have been better. It gets let down by the script and the casting of the lead Abigail Breslin.

The rest of the actors do on the whole a pretty good job and overlooking Abigail Breslin's obvious miscasting this was an entertaining movie to watch. Just don't expect too much going in.

Wes Bentley, Cameron Bright, Alexander Ludwig and Francesca Eastwood are all actors I have seen before and their performances while good are let down by the unpolished script dialogue.

The movie is quite short at 78 minutes before the credits and the story is quite good, but for one glaring plot hole.

I gave this a 5.5 rounded up to a 6/10, which is better than the current average on here, it could have easily been an 8 with some work on the script and a more appropriate lead actress.

24 March 2016. It wasn't Abigail Breslin's fault I assume, but the script just didn't allow her to really shine in this movie. Her martial arts, well her kick-boxing skills or taking apart and putting together a weapon just weren't on par for as long as she trained for example as La Femme Nikita (1990), Elektra (2005), Hannah (2011) Daisy and Violet (2011), or Miss Meadows (2014). There was too much light in the darkened forest which was too unrealistic. As for the hallucination horror scenes, they weren't on par with such classics as The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Cell (2000), Silent Hill (2006), Black Death (2010). As a thriller, the movie did have a consistently and understandable plot, with some wry humor, and decent acting, and an atmosphere in this nevertheless predicable movie. But it could have been better.