User Reviews

Four people have mysteriously disappeared from the small town of Deerheaven within the past 9 months, the backwoods police are baffled, until a shady psychiatrist comes to town pointing his finger squarely at Henry (Leon Acord), the local mortician. Meanwhile numerous murders occur, before four college friends whom want to spice up a particularly lame party decide to break into the mortuary after it closes to get their groove on.

The young adults don't even get to the mortuary until the second half of the film and when they do they're just not likable enough to really give a damn what happens to them. So apart from some rather random murders in the beginning, two random gratuitous short nude scenes, and Dr. Gronig acting like a cheap dime-store copy of Halloween's Dr. Loomis, there's nothing going on for this little film. Highly derivative, and boring. Fairly well filmed (as in aesthetically it looks good for the budget the film had, i'm guessing it was shot on the cheap), but it's still not worth your time. So in the immortal words of South Park's Officer Barbrady 'move along, nothing to see here'.

Eye Candy: one extra gets fully nude, while another just gets topless

My Grade: D+

DVD Extras: Trailers for Windcroft & Badland

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another edition of "Essentially Fraudulent Theater"! Today we'll be taking a look at Final Remains, another dollop of sub-amateurish slop that should have never, ever, ever, EVER been released on DVD. This thing is so ungodly horrible, I suspected for a brief while that it was actually an inadequate attempt at spoof or satire of the soul crushingly low-budget slasher genre. As the film continued, however, it became clear I was mistaken. Writer/director Shawn Hazelaar is simply a talentless cretin. I will give him a tiny bit of credit for having a couple of naked chicks in this affront to human dignity but in ever other respect, Hazelaar demonstrates that he doesn't have the brains or the ability to make a ham sandwich, let alone a motion picture.

I'm not going to fully detail what sadly passes for the plot of this abomination because I'm afraid doing so would severely sprain my capacity to love and leave me a broken and bitter man for the rest of my life. Let's just say that a bunch of random garbage happens, interspersed with occasional flashes of hyperactive editing, and then a foursome of 20somethings winds up drunk and high in a mortuary where they badly ad lib some overly long scenes until a killer finally shows up and goes on a poorly conceived, poorly staged and poorly videotaped rampage. Things lurch along like a crippled giraffe until an ending which I would defy any human being on this Earth to explain the logic or rationale of.

Final Remains is not a professional piece of work. It doesn't even deserved the classification of "amateur". There's about a billion different examples I could site, but I think this one sums them all up. There's a scene where a girl is chased down a hallway and into a room. Later on, there's another scene where a girl is chased and she goes down the exact same hallway and into the exact same room. Now, I'm not insisting on using a different location for each chase. Maybe in the decrepit monkey brain of Shawn Hazelaar, there was some reason both girls ran down the same hallway and into the same room. But these lazy bastards couldn't even be bothered to move the frickin' camera and shoot the scenes from even slightly different angles. They just repeated the same scene with different actresses. You can get away with that in porno but not legitimate cinema.

The reason why I briefly suspected this might be a pitiful effort at humor or some kind of meta-commentary on slasher flicks is because it uses virtually every horror movie cliché and does so in the most incompetent possible ways. But even the crudest forms of satire have to have a point and there never is one to anything that goes on in Final Remains. What momentarily appears to be ironic is nothing more than extremely idiotic.

Putting this excrement out for unsuspecting viewers to rent is akin to fraud. It's the moral equivalent of promising to give someone liposuction, then cutting them with a pocket knife and sticking a DustBuster into the incision. Streaming it for free online should probably violate local standards of decency in every city, town and mud hut village in the world. If you pay money to watch this, you are a fool. If you watch it for free, you are still a fool. Vanguard Cinema, the folks who distributed this insulting mess, should be prosecuted and sent to ram-you-up-the-ass federal prison for at least 10 years.

This concludes another edition of "Essentially Fraudulent Theater"!

The film starts out rather amusing in a campy sort of way. We are introduced to young Casey and his sister Tina (Heather Hartmann). Tina and her gf Sky (Michelle Bellaver) have two stoner boyfriends. They opt to break into a Mortuary occupied by Henry Parks (Leon Acord), a man who the police was warned about by another weirdo. Meanwhile the town is upset by the number of disappearances.

As far as a slasher film, it doesn't make it. It works better as a campy film, which appears to be the intent, by the humor wanes and so does the film. Worth watching as part of a 30 Horror Film Collection. Made in 2005, you would swear in was closer to 1985.

Parental Guide: F-bomb, no sex. Nudity (Jennifer Arter, Barbara Cali- full frontal)