Review: Horrorfest 10 – THE FINAL

THE FINAL is a disturbing, mean-spirited teen revenge fantasy about a normal day at a normal High School. The jocks and mean girls terrorize the misfits. The misfits capture their tormentors and proceed to torture, mutilate, and murder them. The point of the picture seems to be that incidents like this can happen but after Columbine, everyone already knows that. Though it played at Horrorfest, THE FINAL is not really a horror film though it’s presented and directed like one. It seems to be a response to the student shooting sprees that made headlines in the late 1990s, but it wants to offer easy explanations and use obvious stereotypes to make it’s point. THE FINAL tackles a sensitive issue in an exploitative way and the result is uncomfortable but surprisingly compelling drama.

The central character of THE FINAL is Dane (Marc Donata), an awkward student with a deadly vendetta and suicidal tendencies. Dane leads a group of fellow outcasts (socially inadequate dweebs such as the goth chick, the mistrusted mid-eastern kid, etc) in a plot to avenge the years of humiliation they faced by the students at their High School who wield the social power of deciding who is in and who is out. They lure the popular students (clichéd dumb jocks and foxy cheerleaders) to a remote farmhouse on the pretense of a Halloween party.     There they drug them, chain them up, and hold them hostage.   Employing ideas inspired both from their classes as well as from horror films they watched, the outcasts turn the tables on the popular students who made sport of them using guns, acid, swords, garden pruners, acupuncture needles, and a compressed air-powered bolt gun (gee, I wonder where the filmmakers got that idea?).

THE FINAL, which claims to be loosely based on true events (a claim I’m not buying!), takes a kitchen sink approach to the horror genre, throwing in elements from all types of similar films. It’s a teen revenge movie, a siege movie, a hostage movie, a ‘torture porn’ movie, and a study of teen social castes. The result is a story that feels original as a whole, but looks derivative when broken down into pieces. Stir REVENGE OF THE NERDS, HEATHERS, SAW, ELEPHANT, and MEAN GIRLS into a bloody stew and you’ll come out with something that closely resembles THE FINAL. In an era where just about everything in film is ripping off someone else, I’m not sure that’s really a negative. The fact that director Joey Stewart and writer Jason Kabolati have managed to put so many different things into this pot and bring them to a fresh boil is actually something of a worthy achievement. Setting up a scenario where everyone is, either literally or figuratively, held hostage is clever and the filmmakers use their knowledge of teen-movie clichés cunningly. The weakest thing about THE FINAL is that they’ve cast characters out of the stock pool of ‘pretty people’ knocking around Hollywood. Their cruelty comes from a clichéd mold only found in movies about vicious High School kids, but this lack of realism works in the film’s favor. Since the second half is basically a series of tortures and cruelty, maybe a more authentic approach would have been too much for any audience to handle (or certainly an audience looking for a fun night at the movies). The camera doesn’t shy away from the violence these kids inflict on one another. It’s right up there on the screen, completely integral to the story so perhaps it’s better that these victims personalities are so shallowly developed. The terrorism inflicted by the teenage bigots in the form of bullying, which is rarely forgotten or forgiven, has triggered a dramatic enough response. The message in THE FINAL is clear: there is no explanation for school massacres like Columbine and no easy fix for a shocked society in attempting to point the blame in the traditional directions like heavy metal music or violent movies. Viewers looking for a dark comedy with a biting edge to it look elsewhere for THE FINAL is deadly serious.