The Final Sacrifice (1990)

Simply A Masterpiece

best movie i've ever seen.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

If you've only seen movies like "Ararat" (about the Armenian Genocide) and "The Barbarian Invasions" (about a political activist with terminal cancer who gets together with his friends), then you could be forgiven for thinking that Canada only makes masterpieces. Also, most of the movies riffed on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" are bad but only to the extent of being guilty pleasures (and some are merely slipshod).But every once in a while, there's a movie that's the celluloid equivalent of a human rights abuse. The crime against humanity in question is called "The Final Sacrifice", and it comes from Canada! An incompetently made piece of junk about a demonic cult and their quest to retrieve a map so that they can take over the world, it naturally provided fodder for MST3K. Pearl subjected Mike, Servo and Crow to it. The movie has so many plot holes and well-that-was-sure-convenient moments that I won't waste time discussing them, but let's just say that there's a reason why the people involved in the production don't have Wikipedia entries.Basically, it's got to be one of the worst movies ever made. Without a doubt you'll want to watch MST3K's presentation. If in fact you suffer the horrible fate of watching the movie on its own, then you'll want to follow it up with, say, an Ed Wood movie to wash the awfulness out of your mind. As for Canada, it's made movies like "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (about a working class Jewish boy trying to make it big in 1940s Montreal) and "Strange Brew" (depicting a pair of archetypal Canadians), so it's mostly doing well.In conclusion, Pearl is a horrible person for making Mike and the 'bots watch this.

First thing I have to say - this was not a movie made for peanuts; this was made for the kind of budget that budget movies spend on peanuts.So we can cut it a little slack on the production and casting. The plot, however, has far too many coincidences to take seriously. And Mike Pipper's bit of Basil Exposition always reminds me of 'Blazing Saddles' and the "authentic frontier gibberish" line.Thank God for Mystery Science Theater 3000, then! They take a potboiler destined for total oblivion and somehow give it greatness and a strangely lovable afterlife.Zap Rowsdower is the kind of hero that those of us without six-pack stomachs, killer cheekbones and effortlessly tousled-looking hair can aspire to be.

If you look at IMDb's infamous Bottom 100 list of the lowest rated films of all time closely, you may just notice that a HUGE number of these films have been featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000"-- and that is THE reason they've made the list. This does not necessarily mean that these films are the most horrible ones out there and I have been surprised to see that a few of the MST3K films aren't even that horrible. While "The Final Sacrifice" is bad, films like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "The Room" inexplicably never made the list...and should have instead.My verdict for "The Final Sacrifice" is that the film shouldn't be considered for any list for several reasons. While it does suck, the movie was a student film made by some young folks STUDYING to be filmmakers. It also was not released in theaters. Yes, the acting is bad at times, there isn't a lot of plot and the editing, continuity and direction are poor--but so what? It's what it is--a bad student film and nothing more.

The Final Sacrifice is a very low budget movie about a geeky kid who goes on a quest to find a lost city, while trying to figure out what happened to his dad. He gets chased by a villain who looks a lot like a stereotypical gestapo agent, and a bunch of incompetent, mask wearing, machete wielding henchmen. He gets help from a homeless man named Rowsdower (great name) and Yosemite Sam type character. It's pretty badly done, I guess due to a low budget, the plot is way too simplistic, the characters are pretty goofy,and the acting is on school play level. However, it is not (surprisingly enough) spectacularly bad, just normally bad. And with the simple plot, you would think it would be pretty straight forward, and lots of opportunities for bad action scenes, but the end is actually kind of confusing, and the movie as a whole is pretty boring.