It's hardly done **Twilight **money, but the relative success of A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas at the US box office has given director Todd Strauss-Schulson his pick of inexpensive future projects. The one he's gone with is horror comedy** Final Girls**, which is coming together at New Line.
The title refers to the well-worn slasher movie trope of whittling down a cast of teens until there's only a Final Girl to take on the maniac. Jamie Lee Curtis is the final girl in Halloween, for example, as is Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Wolf Creek played with those genre expectations quite cleverly, and comics heroine Cassie Hack (pictured - any excuse) is a final girl-turned-professional slasher killer. Sadly, there's still little sign of the long-developing Hack/Slash film actually happening.
Final Girls revolves around a girl called Max whose mother was a 1980s scream queen, but disappeared. When Max and her friends are magically sucked into the world of a famous slasher film, she finds herself reunited with her starring mom, and the two have to take down the movie's psycho together. We're guessing it doesn't go well for Max's pals.
The official line is "Friday The 13th meets Back To The Future", but everybody is studiously avoiding saying the obvious, which is that this sounds like a horror Last Action Hero. Has nobody involved read Empire issue 269?
Writers Mark Fortin and Josh Miller are currently making their own revisions to their spec script, but casting and shooting may have to wait until Strauss-Schulson is finished with the similarly humorous but less frightening Family Getaway.