THE FINAL PROJECT is a found footage movie which tells the story of six classmates who undertake to make a documentary about the Lafitte Plantation, which evidently is real-life historical site, in order to investigate reports of a haunting. Naturally, they find more than what they expected.
Starting with a boiler plate haunted house outline is not necessarily bad so long as the film-makers add enough interesting elements to make the film still unique and memorable. For example, DEADSTREAM (2022) turned this concept into an enjoyable horror-comedy by interweaving clever humorous commentary on social media influencers.
Unfortunately, PROJECT adds nothing unique, interesting or new. The story is bare bones, instead filled up with banal exchanges apparently meant to convey that this is a group of horny, self-centered students which, however, in actuality conveys nothing more than that the screenwriters were too lazy to think up interesting dialogue and instead probably just let the actors improvise. In fact, the useless filler takes up so much time that the group does not even get to the haunted house until almost exactly the midpoint of the movie.
Once there, the haunted house is underwhelming, as there is no atmosphere to speak of. The cinematography seems really amateurish, and major plot holes become painfully apparent: the students have modern equipment but no cell phones with which to contact each other when they are separated? They want to spend the night but brought nothing that one would normally bring for an overnight stay? When several members of the team go missing, they insist on splitting up, and getting help does not cross their minds until they are down to two?
Once the students begin to be offed, it looks like a human is doing it. I considered that there was going to be a plot twist in that the house was not haunted after all, but that the murders were going to be revealed as the workings of a madman, a la SCOOBY DOO, but darker. If planting such doubts was intentional, then the movie did have at least one interesting aspect, but because the overall level of this movie is so amateurish, I cannot be sure that it really was intended. Oh, and the movie does have one effective jump scare.
One aspect that grates is that the film is inconsistent on some very basic issues: In one scene in the house, all the members of the team introduce themselves, but not the person behind the camera who must be a ghost, apparently. In fact, the movie gets the number of students/victims wrong several times, and the final scene also contradicts what we were told just a couple minutes before (and at the beginning of the movie). Such sloppiness betrays the amateurishness of a mediocre student project. I wonder how this was theatrically released at all.
