The Final Terror

Directed by Andrew Davis, The Final Terror follows a group of friends as they head into the woods for a weekend of camping and debauchery – with bloodshed ensuing as the characters find themselves stalked by a mysterious, possibly feral figure. It’s a well-worn premise that is, for the most part, employed to seriously underwhelming effect by Davis, as the filmmaker, working from Jon George, Neill D. Hicks, and Ronald Shusett’s script, delivers a sluggish and incongruously tame thriller that suffers from a total lack of compelling protagonists – with talented performers like Joe Pantoliano, Rachel Ward, and Daryl Hannah unable to breathe any life into their uniformly (and distressingly) flat, one-dimensional characters. The increasingly interminable atmosphere is compounded by Davis’ murky visuals and a hopelessly repetitive structure, as The Final Terror progresses into an endless second half that revolves mostly around the surviving heroes’ dimly-lit efforts at both evading their enemy and, eventually, fighting back. By the time the laughably anticlimactic finish rolls around, The Final Terror has certainly confirmed its place as a forgettable and mostly unwatchable misfire with few similarities to Davis’ subsequent (and vastly superior) output.

* out of ****