The Final Terror

A young couple named Jim and Lori lose control of their motorbike while riding in a forest. With Jim hurt, Lori finds no help and returns, only to find Jim dead hanging from a tree before she is killed by a trap. Weeks later, a group of campers consisting of Dennis, Margaret, Windy, Marco, Nathaniel, Boone, Eggar, Vanessa, Mike, and Melanie, arrive at the forest. The group makes a clearing and spend the night around a bonfire telling a story about a young teenager who was raped and became insane, so she was put in a local mental institution, where she gave birth to a baby boy who was taken from her. When the boy was 19, he took his mother from the institution and released her to live in the forest. The next morning, the group discover that Marco and Eggar are missing. While the others search for them, Mike takes a swim with Melanie and later they have sex, during which Mike is stabbed to death by a camouflaged killer who then kidnaps Melanie. Nathaniel and Dennis find an abandoned cabin containing an old grave. Dennis enters the cabin and Nathaniel hears him scream, only for it to be a prank by Dennis trying to scare him. While searching the cabin for food and items, they find a severed wolf's head in a cabinet and are shaken before returning to the camp. That night, the killer appears near Margaret in her sleep and she hysterically tells the others what she saw. The campers also find Marco, who has returned to the camp. After Vanessa gets angry at the men for scaring the girls, she walks off alone to the outhouse; she screams when Mike's severed head falls onto her, and the group comes to her aid. The group spends one more night at the camp, and unsuccessfully search for Melanie who they assumed was still with Mike. In the morning they go to the cabin to look for the killer, unaware that he is down in the basement with a captured Melanie, and they flee with the rafts after finding a human hand in a glass jar. While rafting along the river, the body of Melanie is tossed onto the boat by the killer which causes panic among the group. Burying Melanie near the river, the group continues on to the end of the river and find their empty, broken-down bus. They spend the night there, but the killer attacks and gets inside the bus before the group escapes out the back door. Windy gets separated and is slashed by the killer, where the group comes to her and gives her first aid. In the morning, the group gathers supplies and camouflages themselves. They find a knocked over redwood tree and devise an ambush on Eggar. Dennis climbs one of the highest trees, where he sets a spiked log trap. Marco begins calling out for Eggar, who appears and begins to strangle Marco with a rope. The group attacks Eggar, believing he is the killer. While Dennis is watching the rest of the group fight, the killer climbs out from the roots of the knocked over redwood tree. The killer slashes Dennis's ankle and he falls to his death. The killer rises up to scream; it is revealed that Eggar's missing, feral mother (the subject of the earlier story) is the killer. As she walks toward the group, she sets off the trap and is mortally wounded. The group watch in silent horror as Eggar's mother hangs dead in the trap. ==Cast==

Eggar’s Mother is played by three different actors in the film: Joe Pantoliano, Tony Maccario, and stunt performer Jeannie Epper. Only Maccario was credited. ==Themes==

Film scholar John Kenneth Muir notes in his book Horror Films of the 1980s that The Final Terror exemplifies a trend of slasher films boasting a "man-versus-nature" trope. Muir writes: "In the 1980s, Americans had more creature comforts, including Atari 2600s, VCRs, shopping malls, and less of a need to seek leisure outside in the woods... Ever since Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country (1936), cinema has played with the notion of nature as a foreign place... The Final Terror is no Renoir movie, yet (much like 1977's The Hills Have Eyes and, to a much lesser degree, 1983's The Prey), it explores the idea that wilderness is just that." ==Production==

Development After the success of such slasher films as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff pitched the idea of making a horror film to his friend and co-producer, Joe Roth. The project marked Arkoff's first major feature following his departure from American International Pictures. The original screenplay, which had the working title Bump in the Night, consisted of a sparse plot about "rich boys and girls going off into the woods and getting killed." The screenplay was co-written by Ronald Shusett, who had previously co-written Alien (1979) with Dan O'Bannon. under the working title Three Blind Mice. The accompanying crew consisted of only four people. The majority of filming was completed by Davis, though the opening sequence featuring the anonymous couple being murdered was later filmed by an editor. Some of the establishing camp sequences were filmed at the California Conservation Corps camp in northern California. During filming, the cast and crew stayed in Crescent City and would enter through the border before filming all day in Oregon and also traveling along the Whitewater River. Upon driving in one of their cars, the crew had hit a Redwood tree and Smith cited their excuse was "someone putted the tree out on the street". In the log-trap creation scene where Dennis Zorich was climbing up the tree, they used real tree-climbers and logging techniques. ==Release==

After film was completed, it was shelved for two years until 1983 as the producers searched for a distributor. The film only had five deaths, so the beginning scene with the couple getting killed was filmed in order to have a higher chance of a distributor picking up the film. However, the scene was shot without the director's permission, so Roth had to pay a fee, some of it sourced from funds intended for Davis' wedding at the time. In the United Kingdom, the film was released under the title Campsite Massacre in mid-1983. It was released theatrically in the United States on October 28, 1983. At the time of its release, several of the film's stars had garnered recognition for other acting roles, including Hannah, who had had a major role in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Ward, who made a critically acclaimed appearance in the miniseries The Thorn Birds, and Zmed, who had been cast as a regular on the network series T. J. Hooker. Critical response The film received mixed reviews at the time of its release, Writing for The Baltimore Sun, Stephen Hunter faulted the film as it "never builds any real tension or energy, even within the limited confines of the genre...  Although the kids...  are handsome enough, they never develop any personalities." Hunter did note, however, that the film's "production values are unusually high." Terry Lawson of the Dayton Journal Herald criticized the film's plot for being derivative, adding that both Ward and Hannah "do their jobs, which is to look beautiful even when scared out of their makeup. The only real performance in the film is rendered by John Friedrich, who does a Robert De Niro imitation that is so blatantly bad that one can only hope he intended it as parody." In their capsule review, the Shreveport Times deemed the film "another vehicle in the current horror genre with a newcomer cast and not much else." Writing for the Gannett News Service, Mike Hughes denounced the film as "cheap and bad, without trying to be...  The cast is filled with good people who got better roles while this film was waiting on the shelf." Home media The film came into home video on VHS in the mid 1980s and later had a DVD release in the 2000s. In July 2014, Shout! Factory subsidiary Scream Factory released the film in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, which contains the R-rated version. ==References==