The Final Terror

“Deliverance” meets “Friday the 13th” with undeveloped characters

Some forest workers & friends camp out in the coastal Redwoods of Northern California, but there’s a legend about an escaped female mental patient and her deranged son born of rape.

“The Final Terror” (1983) was shot in the Redwoods in late summer 1981 with only four crewmembers. As my title blurb suggests, it’s a meshing of “Deliverance” (1972) and “Friday the 13th.” The sylvan locations are outstanding, the antagonist is well realized and the no-name cast is interesting and diverse. Unfortunately the script failed to develop actual personalities, plus too many of them are unconvincingly unlikable. We don’t know these people nor do we care about ’em.

Thankfully, the film improves in the second half as it becomes a survival-in-the-woods tale with a couple original elements, like the way the prey (try to) become the hunters.

The movie was shelved for over two years because the producers couldn’t find a distributor. Since the flick only featured three deaths, the opening sequence with the couple getting killed was shot in order to increase its chances of obtaining a distributor. Yet this was done without the director's approval, so the producer had to pay a fee with some of it coming from the director’s wedding at the time. Interestingly, this prologue is one of the more compelling parts of the movie and is highlighted by the only female really worth noting, physically speaking. I’m not saying the other ladies were bad, just that the director evidently didn’t know how to capture the fairer sex on film.

Speaking of which, Daryl Hannah (Wendy) and Rachel Ward (Margaret) were unknowns at the time, but moved on to more proficient productions. So did Adrian Zmed (Marco Cerone), but less impressively so.

The film runs 1 hour, 22 minutes, and was shot at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in extreme Northern California and the Crescent City area.

GRADE: C+