The Final Project

Could have been entertaining, but even for a found footage film the production was horrible.

You expect some shaky POV shots in the action scenes, but even in the character development portion, apparently no one knows how to use a camera. The viewer sees mostly chopped off heads and crotch shots or weird angles while the camera is moving and shaking as they climb stairs, pan over empty rooms, and open doors.

The audio for the film also failed, it is so low or the speakers are partially off screen, forcing you to turn on the captions and crank up the volume to try to hear them. It was a major fail.

The establishing characters portion went on practically forever and yet gave no reason to care about them.

When they finally make it to their documentary location (almost halfway through) then 90% of the action occurs off screen or from the victims POV camera which is either pointing the wrong way, on the fritz or pitch black.

I don't often say this, but this movie isn't worth your time.

I gave up sitting down to watch this film and used it as background noise to cleaned house instead.

Stars are given based on my personal enjoyment of the film and plot.

1 - Storyline dragged on too long. I got bored and stopped watching or fast forwarded to the end.

This movie didn't make the effort and neither will I. 30 minutes of watching fake interviews, "college students" eating pizza, "college students" sitting in class, and then having the fakest game of "never have I ever" before they even get to the haunted house. I turned it off at the 30 minute mark when I realized how much of my time the director was willing to waste just to set up yet another found-footage haunted house movie.

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.

WOW!!! how did some people give this terriblle cheap, badly acted, no story film more than 2*'s????? They must know or of been involved in this time waster of a film, ok a film about students doing a film project in an old plantation, takes forever to get there and my god its badly framed as some peopleare not even in frame, also very poor sound and picture quality. The van ride there goes on and on and on and on!!!!!! It was hard not to stop it and watch a good found footage film, parts of this are rippedof from the far superior blair witch project, not a lot happens when they get there, any kills are of screen or far away and the end titles go on and on to drag the short 80mins. Not good at all AVOID!!!!

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.