Per Chris Snellgrove
| Published
I’m a huge horror fan, but two things stop me from watching scary movies: bad reviews and a bad cover. Unfortunately, in 2015 The ultimate girl it suffers from both, which is why I continued to ignore the film no matter how many times my various algorithms shoved it in my face. I finally gave in and watched this movie for free on Tubi, and I’m happy to report that despite what the haters say, this almost perfect horror movie.
The cast of The Last Girl draws attention
The cast The ultimate girl is pretty thin, but has some pretty big names, including Abigail Breslin (best known for Little Miss Sunshine) as the titular final girl and Wes Bentley (best known for American beauty and Interstellar) as her no-nonsense trainer. She is trained by a mysterious organization that gives her James Bond-level skills to help her kill bad guys. In this film, the bad guys in question are a quartet of murderous boys led by a charismatic sociopath (Alexander Ludvig, best known for The Hunger Games and Vikings TV show).
Although it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I really liked it The ultimate girl due to its low-key storytelling, including the fact that we don’t get many exact details about who this mysterious organization is, what its purpose is, or even the exact year this period takes place. It’s the ultimate “show don’t tell” horror movie, and that’s only fitting because of director Tyler Shields. Shields is actually a photographer by profession and it is to his credit that he gives each frame of the film a distinctive style, a style that finds a balance between artistic excess Zack Snyder and the artistic minimalism of Jim Jarmusch.
Buffy fans take note
If you like horror movies, you might enjoy this The ultimate girl undermines expectations in a beautiful tradition Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The bad guys are a quartet of young assassins whose dark ploy involves picking an unsuspecting target, taking them to the woods, and revealing their plan to hunt and kill them while dressed in tuxedos. They intended Breslin’s character to be their next target, not knowing that she had spent her entire life training to kill these types of scoundrels in the most brutally creative ways.
The film is equally creative, but that can be hard to appreciate unless you look past its very tropical design. It’s basically a classic revenge story with the twist that the potential victim is willing to turn the tables, something akin to what you’d get if Buffy Summers hunted human monsters instead of the undead. Despite some very familiar tropes on display, this film’s dialogue is sparkling, the cinematography is breathtaking, and the kills are both unpredictable and satisfying, making this film more than the sum of its trope-y parts.
Not enough reviews
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciated The ultimate girl almost as much when it came out (first via a limited release in theaters and then via video on demand). On Rotten Tomatoesthe film currently has a 25 percent critical rating, albeit from only 12 critics. And while every fanboy likes to say that critics have done their favorite movies a dirty trick, this is one case where most critics were actually wrong, complaining about things like the plot being simple and the film being too violent. What the hell did they expect from a horror movie?
It is true that The ultimate girl won’t wow you with the convoluted plot of a Chris Nolan movie, but I’d argue that the best slasher movies are those that stick to the classic formula of movies like Friday the 13th while he still managed to surprise us with several unexpected twists. That’s exactly what it is The ultimate girl does: it takes the formula of hunting and killing unsuspecting victims in the woods, but turns those victims into potential victims. The result is a rare horror film where we can root for a brutal killer while she’s busy killing some of the worst people.
Will you find The ultimate girl as exciting as I am, or will you agree with the critics that this attempt at an artsy slasher fails to hit the cinematic artery? The only way to find out is to stream it for free on Tuba. I’ll leave you with a simple reminder that I wish someone had shared with me when this movie came out in 2015: it’s a lot, many better than its hideous cover would imply.
The ultimate girl flows is Tubi.