The Final Terror

There’s a damned cool idea at the center of The Final Terror. Having the majority of the campers be experienced survivalists and realize something bad is going down early on, staying together as a group … it’s smart. When there’s 15 minutes left of the movie and six of the original ten people are camouflaged and setting a trap for the killer, it sounds great. A total subversion of the slasher tropes we all know and shrug at. It’s too bad then that the rest of The Final Terror is an utter bore. Because, at its heart, this movie wants to rip off Friday The 13th and Just Before Dawn and The Burning, but it doesn’t seem to know that ripping off a slasher movie means BEING A SLASHER MOVIE. This thing has a death toll you can count on one hand with fingers to spare until the final 90 seconds … and even then, one of the last two is the killer. And even then, the kills are mostly cutaways or offscreen. The main character is obnoxious and abusive; virtually everybody else is interchangeable in a way even Friday The 13th doesn’t sink to. I literally know two characters’ names out of ten, and could only distinguish the rest with the most base characteristics: one is a white woman with a British accent. Two people are black, a man and a woman. One woman is Darryl Hannah. That’s how deep this movie draws these characters. There is nothing worth watching here. The unique premise of having the group be aware and intelligent is wasted by a movie too stupid to successfully paint by numbers. Were it not for the one fresh idea, this would get one star and like it.