The original Friday the 13th has a lot to answer for, not just for itself and its own lousy sequels, but for all the imitations spawned in its wake. I may be a fan of horror, in general, but the slasher is one of my least favorite sub-genres.
1983’s The Final Terror is not the worst of these I have encountered to date, but it isn’t anything special either. What is most surprising is the casting. In among the earliest roles in their careers, we have Daryl Hannah (from Blade Runner), Joe Pantoliano (from The Matrix) and Rachel Ward (from my dreams—I mean, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid).
In a concept that is roughly 75% Friday the 13th and 25% Deliverance, a group of rangers organize a clean-up job of a forest they don’t normally wander into. All of which is basically a ruse to take some town girls camping which, according to 80’s horror movies, was a euphemism for drinking, getting high, having sex and probably getting murdered. Sticking to convention, getting horizontal will result in becoming permanently horizontal.
Among the stock elements to be found: the local mental hospital, a driver who was once a resident of said institution, a campfire horror story that cuts too close to the bone for one person, and a creepy cabin.
I believe around a quarter of the dialogue is characters yelling the names of other characters who are missing. For a picture like this, I like to imagine the script actually had pages and pages of lines like “MARCO!”. I kept holding out hope someone would yell back “POLO!” but to no avail.
As with almost any film, there were some odd elements, though nothing which would make me want to see it again or recommend it to others. One thing was a horrible bus trip sing-a-long of “Three Blind Mice” where they compound the inanity by only singing the title. Also, there’s a corpse they bury on the riverside instead of trying to take it back to civilization. I guess they assumed local police wouldn’t be interested in a homicide.
Probably the weirdest element occurs at the very beginning, yet it was daft enough that I remembered it afterwards. A woman is running through the woods when she triggers a trap that apparently kills her. It is revealed the trap was a couple of extremely flimsy tree limbs with metal can lids tied to them. I know I’m overthinking it, but the physics of such a thing seems like it might be possible to lose an eye or incur multiple cuts, but I can’t imagine any fatal results.
In closing, all I feel needs to be said of The Final Terror is it has two things wrong with its title: nothing in it was terrifying and, lamentably, it has been far from the end of the slasher genre.
Director: Andrew Davis
Starring: John Friedrich, Adrian Zmed, Joe Pantoliano
Watched on Shudder