The Final Project (2016)

Strong and Moving!

Fantastic!

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

May contain plot spoilers if you never saw a bad found footage film.A group of college kids from Southwestern Louisiana decide as a project to spend a night at a haunted plantation, near where Genevieve Richard (Arin Jones) grew up. The party includes her current high testosterone boyfriend Gavin (Sergio Suave) and out of the closet ex-boyfriend Jonah (Leonardo Santaiti) as well as some eye candy.A lot of film was wasted on the ride as a way to introduce character with the game " Never have I ever..." It was a boring fail. At 37 minutes into the film, they finally make it into the house and about 50 minutes an event happens with a twist you expect if you ever saw a slasher film where one person is the home boy.The found footage includes ground cam, running cam, some dark cam, and the Quarantine climax person dragged across the floor cam. The picture was introduced by a man who is shadowed and pixilated, as well as voice disguised so we can't identify him, but later he identifies himself as the brother of the "final girl." The film went all out on special effects like doors closing by themselves and more doors closing by themselves, and more doors making a banging sound. Was Jim Morrison from here? The sound was incredibly annoying as if they were dragging the microphone across the ground so we can hear every leaf that was stepped on by a half dozen college savage trodders being magnified.Oh yes. The acting left something to be desired, although the dialogue sucked so bad I couldn't tell if it was the actors or not.Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity, although we get to hear a girl urinate quite loudly...if you're into that.

I felt a deep connection with the characters while watching this film. The actors seemed very genuine.The director did a great job of guiding the actors at the beginning of the film. I felt I was transported back to high school and I was assigned a project. The genuine dialogue created a sense of reality and it seem like it was really found footage! The first kill was unexpected. I didn't realize it was happening until 5 seconds after the person was being attacked. This was because the director was able to successfully execute a sense of relief and safety at this point. This made the kill seem so much more dramatic. This was the point of the movie where I couldn't look away until the very end. Every second after this had me on edge, especially the climax! This is one of the best found footage horror movies I've seen in a while.

THE FINAL PROJECT is another homemade found footage horror in which absolutely nothing happens other than a bunch of shaky camera work and a whole lot of bad acting and screaming. The storyline, if it can be described as such, involves a bunch of students who decide to visit a haunted plantation for a school project. On arrival they interview a bunch of locations, arrive on location...and you can guess the rest.Very little happens in terms of incident in this film. There's no gore, danger, or suspense, just a lot of reacting to stuff the viewer isn't involved with. About one person gets killed on screen and the rest is just a noisy blur. This found footage film is definitely at the lower end of the scale with an almost entire lack of characterisation and near-constant screaming that makes it a very difficult watch. It's about on par with Michael Rooker's THE LOST EPISODE in terms of quality, i.e. at the very bottom of the barrel.

But an A for effort to the filmmakers. The Final Project seems to go one level down in the found footage category in order to make it seem more realistic. The low quality of the film work makes it seem like this is footage recovered from the sister of one of the survivors that shows the events of a group of amateur film students, documenting a hunted plantation. Nice work there.The movie really suffers from the low quality of acting. Some of it did not feel natural at all, it felt force, like I knew they were acting and none of this actually happen. The bad acting would not be much of a problem if the haunting happen a lot sooner. They took a long time to set up the characters, and the time in which they explored the house for a ghost was small in comparison. These kids are not interesting enough for the horror part of the horror movie to go by so quick.It's also pretty lame that in a found footage movie, filmmakers did not use everything they had access to. There was a point in the film when all the students had GoPros strapped to their heads, yet none of that footage got found along with the rest. Maybe the low-budget indi film did not have money for that?Plus, and possibly most importantly, I was not scared or freaked out at all by anything going on on the screen. The quarterback makes a good toss, but the ball gets fumbled.Yeah, I respect the filmmakers for what they tried to do in the Found footage genre using the bare minimum to make it real, but I think the cast of characters could have used a few more practice runs before making the Final Project.