John’s Horror Corner: The Final Terror (1983), Daryl Hannah and Joe Pantoliano in a B-horror movie?

MY CALL: Yeah… this was pretty boring. Not awful. But there is too much from the early 80s slasher era that is much better to recommend this. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Final Terror: For more early 80s slashers featuring stars before they were famous, try Friday the 13^th (1980; Kevin Bacon), Mortuary (1983; Bill Paxton) and Amityville 3-D (1983; Meg Ryan).

A training team of park rangers is assigned a camping-work detail in the woods. With four young men (including Joe Pantoliano; Tales from the Crypt S1) and four young women (including Daryl Hannah; Blade Runner), a lot of toxic masculinity and over-bro’d-up competitiveness ensues. Tensions build, they end up stranded in the forest, people turn up dead, and they realize they need to find a way back to civilization from their very remote location.

Early scenes in this early 80s b-horror show two twenty-somethings killed by some makeshift booby traps in the forest. There’s blood, but no cuts or stabs or horror violence is depicted on-screen. Later scenes feature a classic death mid-sex-scene (but you don’t see anything interesting on-screen there either). So death scenes is definitely not a strong suit for this slasher flick. There’s also a cabin with body parts in jars, and we learn that our protagonists are being hunted by a savvy woodsman with grimy grey hair.

We can see that a lot of effort went into the writing. And it’s not bad. Good even, for an old slasher. But this flick just doesn’t stick the landing at all as a horror movie. The scares are weak to non-existent, the gore is super basic, and the deaths are generally quite uninspired. Oh, and basically nothing worth watching ever happens… like ever. The final kill was almost cool. But just almost.

The original reels of this film were nearly lost forever. And what can be watched now is a Frankensteinian-stitched salvage job of the recovered damaged reels. This old 80s slasher may not be anything special. But it does feature some before-they-were-famous stars and director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Under Siege, Collateral Damage), who would go on to direct several action movie greats. Really, you just watch this movie to say you watched it, and to see two young actors sharpening their acting skills early in their careers.