Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 4, 2016, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The Final Project begins by addressing a question oft-unanswered in found-footage movies: Who found and is presenting the footage, and why? The first scene has a shadow-shrouded figure telling us he has put together the following visual document as “some type of effort to try and better understand what happened that night.”
It’s a fairly promising start, but in the next breath, our faceless host intones that it’s a mystery to him “why they chose to go into a place that was known to be haunted.” Yes, it’s yet another group of college students/amateur filmmakers heading into yet another old mansion with a ghostly rep; what’s not to understand?
This is going to be a fairly short review, because there’s little to be discussed regarding The Final Project that hasn’t already been said about the 237 other underachieving pseudodocumentary supernatural flicks to follow in the wake of The Blair Witch Project. One difference is that it takes forever for director/co-writer Taylor Ri’chard to get his six young protagonists plus their cameraman inside the walls of the apparently haunted Lafitte Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana. For someone anxious to get to the truth, that guy from the intro sure included a lot of extraneous material, including an endless drive to Lafitte that contains a complete game of Never Have I Ever, plus the first waking-screaming-from-a-nightmare moment I’ve ever seen take place in a moving vehicle.
The students spend the great bulk of their screen time razzing each other, talking dirty and swearing in lieu of developing personalities; we repeatedly hear how they need to complete this documentary project to pass a class, though none of the girls seem concerned about failing the Bechdel test. Other than a window-lurking spirit revealed in an uncharacteristic stationary shot and a smattering of false scares, there isn’t an attempt to raise our hairs till nearly the hour mark of this 80-minute feature, and then everything largely happens offscreen or is conveyed via overly dark and wobbly camerawork. (Although we’re supposedly seeing through head-mounted GoPros, the shadow of a larger handheld rig appears in several last-act shots.)
There’s a smattering of backstory about Lafitte and its spirits, but Ri’chard never builds on it in any interesting ways. Instead, from its setup to its payoff to its presentation, The Final Project is thoroughly hackneyed, right down to its (grammatically incorrect) closing text. “Scary and haunted are two totally different things,” one character says along the way, and in this case, truer words were never spoken.
