10 Great Slasher Horror Movies With Annoying Final Girls

The final girl has been one of the most commonplace tropes in horror cinema since the genre's inception. Such a character is normally the sole survivor (or last to die in darker instances) of a murderously bloody flick in which a wide variety of characters perish in exceedingly grisly fashion.

Some final girls have come to define the films they belong to as much as the murderous villains on offer. Look no further than the endless extensions and reboots of the Laurie Strode story in the Halloween series. The original young survivor of Michael Myers' hijinks is still butting heads with him 44 years later.

Like any good protagonist, a first class final girl figure will have enjoyed a strong level of character development over the course of the film. She'll also have a sympathetic persona and will, in many famous cases, take the fight to the evil causing trouble in the movie.

Needless to say, for every great example of this trope, there's a treasure chest of disasters. More than any other genre, horror's been crippled by low budget, low quality stinkers over the years. However, what's even more curious is when a film manages to be scarily good for the most part only to fall at the hurdle of delivering a solid final girl protagonist.

Here, then, are 10 such entries in the slasher genre.

Despite being a dark inversion of the final girl trope, Mandy Lane still manages to be a bit of an eye-roller.

For the first half of the film, the weirdly oblivious Mandy seems to saunter comfortably through life without putting much thought into the drooling men obsessing over her everywhere she goes. She says little of interest and, if it wasn't for her name being in the title, could almost be dismissed as a borderline object of lust for the horny teenaged boys that populate much of the cast.

Needless to say, her weekend getaway with some other high schoolers quickly descends into murderous mayhem. It turns out Mandy's old friend (and all-round social outcast) Emmett has had enough of seemingly everything and is now killing everyone off for rejecting him. In the kind of surprise twist that's often not that surprising these days, Mandy's actually in league with him and, better still, is the real mastermind behind the whole thing.

The shift in character and arc is a bit jarring to say the least here, as is Amber Heard's struggle to really get the evil, aggressive side of her character across effectively. The ending scenes of her getting away with it all, which were clearly meant to be chilling on paper, just come out a bit hollow in practise thanks to rather half-baked character development and plotting in an otherwise suspenseful film.