The Final Girls is the most baffling genre Valentine to come along in some time. A horror-comedy that forgot the horror half, The Final Girls is a diehard tribute to Friday the 13th that couldn’t possibly satisfy fans of Friday the 13th. The movie almost feels like a quixotic dare: can you make a movie aimed straight at diehard horror fans that pays slavish tribute to everything in the genre except horror?

The Final Girls Trailer

The Final Girls opens with the death of struggling actor Amanda Cartwight (Malin Akerman), mother of The Final Girls main character Max (Taissa Farmiga). Jump ahead a few years and Max finds herself at a screening of her mother’s most beloved movies, the Camp Bloodbath series. After a fiery mishap Max and her friends find themselves transported into the world of Camp Bloodbath, like The Purple Rose of Cairo in reverse or Last Action Hero in normal.

Here, in this exaggerated horror land of, uh, vibrant flowers (the money spent on vibrant fake flowers could have bought a lot of corn syrup and red food coloring), Max must team up with her dead mother’s Camp Bloodbath character against the hulking, silent Tiki Jason aka Billy Murphy.

The Final Girls Comedy Chops

Mostly a comedy, the cast of The Final Girls is its greatest asset. Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development and Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley keep the “real” people interesting, with Middleditch playing the Scream-like self-aware nerd. On the opposite side, the “fictional” cast of Camp Bloodbath includes Workaholics’ Adam DeVine and The Kings of Summer’s Angela Trimbur (amazing as a hyper-sexed idiot), who are exactly as bro-y, sexed-up, and cut-off jean shorts bedecked as you’d expect.

But The Final Girls aspires to more than just comedy, which is where it becomes a baffling experiment in doing pretty much everything except horror. To start, it’s about as violent as a Lord of the Rings movie. While everything from the killer’s backstory to his chosen weapon demonstrates a fidelity to Jason and his mythos, the filmmaking is much more conceptually modern, loaded with strange swooping, joke-y montages, and an absolutely bonkers color palette that attempts to add energy with surreal composites.

As part of the whole meta construct of The Final Girls, there are a number of jokes that play off the window dressing we’ve come to expect in movies. On-screen captions—such as those establishing a year—are concrete, with people tripping over them and cars slamming into the backs of the letters. This is occasionally funny, such as in an especially great sequence using slow-motion, but they’re mostly too-clever to get a laugh.

Which is kind of a persistent feeling while watching The Final Girls. It can be very funny, but often feels weighed down by its own premise.