.
.
.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Final Terror, The (1983)

... aka: Angst
... aka: Bump in the Night
... aka: Campsite Massacre
... aka: Carnivore
... aka: Creeper, The
... aka: Forest Primeval, The
... aka: Horror at Mill Creek
... aka: Three Blind Mice

Directed by:
Andrew Davis

One of many campground / backwoods slashers that went into production shortly after Friday the 13th proved its box office might in the summer of 1980, this one comes with some pretty big names attached to it. For starters, director Davis would go on to make big budget films like the critically-acclaimed The Fugitive (1993) starring Harrison Ford and a bunch of (not acclaimed but financially successful) Steven Seagal movies. And then we have co-writer Ronald Shusett, who'd previously scripted and helped produce the huge hit ALIEN (1979) and went on to write other horror and sci-fi favorites like Dead & Buried (1981) and Total Recall (1990). In addition, this boasts a cast of up-and-coming familiar faces, among them Joe Pantoliano (The Sopranos), Adrian Zmed (T.J. Hooker), Rachel Ward (The Thorn Birds) and Daryl Hannah (just a few years before Splash). All that combined may lead one to expect more than business as usual but that turns out not to be the case at all. This is strictly by-the-numbers, predictable filmmaking that offers up nothing at all memorable.



A man and his girlfriend wreck their motorcycle and then get butchered (one with a tin can lid booby tap) by an off-screen menace. Soon after, Mike (Mark Metcalf) leads a group of four “youth corps” trainee park rangers; Zorich (John Friedrich), Cerone (Zmed), Hines (Ernest Harden Jr.) and Boone (Lewis Smith), out into the same stretch of woods where the couple has gone missing. On their way, they pick up Mike's girlfriend Melanie (Cindy Harrell) and three of her female friends; Margaret (Ward), Windy (Hannah) and Vanessa (Akosia Busia). As they pull away, Windy's mother turns to her husband and asks “What about that missing couple?” to which he assuredly replies “They'll be OK. There's three adults.” Apparently these two have never seen a horror movie before. Pantoliano has a silly, overacted role as Eggar the mentally-imbalanced bully of a bus driver. With a near-constant scowl on his face, he's asked to grit his teeth, bug his eyes out and scream nearly all of his dialogue at the top of his lungs. For some reason he seems especially mad that the guys will be able to mingle, and potentially score, with some of the girls.








After a singalong of “Three Blind Mice” (at one point the shooting title because they had no clue what else to call this during production) and spending the day clearing wood out of a stream and smoking weed, the gang settle down for a little scary campfire story involving a local urban legend. Supposedly many years earlier when there was a logging camp nearby, a teen girl was raped by her own father, went crazy and gave birth to an incest baby that grew up to become a crazy adult who then sprung his mama out of the nuthouse. Both are now said to haunt the woods. The next day, Mike and Mel discover this legend may be true when someone decides to hack them up, leaving the “teens” to fend for themselves 30 long miles from civilization. They discover a shack where the killer stores body parts in jars and a dog's head in the cupboard and finally decorate themselves in mud and ferns and go all “primitive” by setting up booby traps, but the vast majority of the film is comprised of constantly-bickering characters walking around looking for people.








I was actually looking forward to revisiting a better print of this movie. All I had seen prior was the old Vestron VHS, which was so impenetrably dark you couldn't tell what was even going on half the time. Now that I finally can see everything, sadly, it did little to change my initial opinion. This simply has very little to offer outside of some admittedly nice forest scenery. There's no suspense, scares or real surprises, the plot's completely formulaic and the one-dimensional characters aren't the least bit likable. Add to that a low body count (which makes the “Can anyone survive?” tag line rather humorous... "Yeah, pretty much everybody!") and mostly off-screen kills (the opening pair of murders were added by someone else later on to up the body count for the slasher market) and the movie serves almost no purpose whatsoever. It also wasn't a wise choice for Davis, who also shot the film under the name “Andreas Davidescu” to use “available light” since most of this takes place in a heavily shaded forest. The combination of being bland and looking gloomy makes this difficult to really enjoy on any front.








Shot in 1981, this was held back for release for several years until a few of the cast members started to make names for themselves in other projects. It's “presented” by executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, whose daughter also plays a small role. The TV print contains an additional scene at the beginning with the first two victims at the beach not in the video or DVD prints. According to a disclaimer at the beginning of the Shout! Factory DVD, the negatives and all original film elements are lost, so this is the best they could do with what they had to work with. I really don't know the technicalities of film restoration and won't pretend otherwise but visually their release is perfectly watchable. Whether or not you should even bother is another story entirely.

1/2

14 comments:

crow said...

We are of the same opinion. I guess if one doesn't have anything her to do, this might be a passable time waster, but I could think of better ways. Speaking of really dark prints, I will hopefully be watching a cleaned up version of Humongous soon. I won't hold out hope it will be any better than this was. Oddly enough this is a fan favorite on the IMDb horror board.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Oh yes, the VHS print of Humongous is notorious for being way too dark. I haven't had a chance to see it yet but I hear the DVD is decent and you can finally see what's going on.

Not sure WHY this is a fan favorite though a lot of slashers I think suck (Happy Birthday to Me, Prom Night, etc.) seem to have their fans so I'm not surprised this one does too.

crow said...

I'm under the impression it has something to do with an appeal, albeit nostalgia or being charmed by the 80s decade. Admittedly, I like some of them for these reasons but The Final Terrier wasn't one of them.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Same here. As far as these things go I'd take pretty much any Friday film, The Burning, Just Before Dawn, Sleepaway Camp or any number of others with similar settings over this one. It IS however better than Don't Go in the Woods. lol

crow said...

Haha, yeah, pretty much anything, including The Geek is better than The Final Terror...

crow said...

Well, not The Geek, but Berserker was the film I meant.,with George Buck Flower

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I actually DID like The Geek / Backwoods more than Final Terror! Not sure about Berserker. That is one I need to revisit since I last saw it as a teenager.

zmbdog said...

This is my current research obsession. From what I've seen I think there's a good chance that this film's first screening(s) was in 1981 as THREE BLIND MICE and it also possibly had a test run as THE FOREST PRIMEVAL before it was shelved. I did find it was released in Canada as CAMP SITE MASSACRE, a title I thought was only used in the UK but the U.S. premiere is proving about as hard to find as DEATHDREAM's Florida preview engagements as THE NIGHT ANDY CAME HOME (which I'm convinced did occur but the area previewed lots of films and ads for most simply say SNEAK PREVIEW!).

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

It's certainly possible (actually LIKELY) it was screened prior to the 1983 general release. I recently put in a bunch of research trying to find out the release date for Confessions of a Serial Killer and was unable to get any clear answer so I understand the frustration!

zmbdog said...

It's mentioned in a Jan. 1988 article as an upcoming Jan./Feb. release but I found no mention of it again until a 1992 Cinemax broadcast. Oddly, it's mentioned a few times that John Dwyers is the director. Is imdb wrong here or is it these articles?

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Alright, well that just opened up a whole other can of worms!

I saw the second listing for Confessions on IMDb with Dwyer listed as the director this time. I followed the link to a Confessions website promoting the director's cut and, low and behold, found this: "Mark Blair, the director of Confessions of a Serial Killer, was the pseudonym used by the film’s actual director, John Dwyer. Dwyer was working on a major project for Disney at the time and his agent urged him to use an alias to avoid any potential controversy generated by the graphic content of Confessions…"

So now it all falls into place. That Disney movie was Captain Ron (1992).

The magazine article I found that discusses "rumors" that the director "Mark Blair" died after "he fell off a mountain in Nepal" looks to be an intentionally planted fake story so Dwyer's identity wouldn't be found out. As for why the fake story involved Nepal of all things, there's a John Dwyer who's a prolific travel book writer (one of his books is called 'High Road to Tibet') and he's been published as recently as 2021, plus has his own website and blog that's been updated this year. So I'm assuming this is the same guy. Very, very interesting!

zmbdog said...

The upcoming releases list that CONFESSIONS was on mentioned also mentioned the extremely rare BLOOD SCREAMS as a Jan./Feb. release (and like CONFESSIONS, it's from Concorde). Even more surprising is that it happened! Later that month BLOOD SCREAMS played a couple theaters. That's a title I never would've even searched. I thought it was DTV for sure.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Is the Blood Screams you're talking about the Mexican one with Russ Tamblyn or another film?

zmbdog said...

Yeah the mexican one. aka THE BLOODY MONKS
I'm still hunting for an English language rip of that one. It seems about impossible. I couldn't even find a subtitle file for the Spanish version.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...