THE FINAL (2010)
The Final is another in the never-ending string of high school revenge thrillers. The geeks, oddballs and goth girl get repeatedly abused by the jock clique and the stuck-up hot slutty clique. But then something clicks--a plot for mass revenge and mayhem.
The set-up isn't too bad, despite the horridly cliched tormentors. The guys are beefy, racist, rather brain-dead football players. The women are air-heads whose conversations consist 90% of boasts about who they've slept with and how sexy they look.
They all get invited to a costume party in the middle of the woods, where the spiked punch knocks them out and they awaken chained together and prepared for torturous revenge by the weaklings of the school.
Sadly, the movie falls apart from there, despite the two GIMP scenes.
Heather (Julin), the annoying head slut, is strapped to their torture chair and ballgagged. Goth girl Emily (Lindsay Seidel) applies some corrosive gunk on Heather's face that will slowly and painfully eat away her flesh.
Her struggling is weak. There's only scant mmmphing. And the scene is much too short. Her actual suffering occurs offscreen.
The second scene is better. Bridget (Whitney Hoy) gets strapped to the chair and head bully Bradley is forced to cut off her fingers with garden shears. She gets cleave-gagged by the goth girl as she screams in horror.
Despite the bloody aspect of the scene (it's not that gory), it was more effective because the actual suffering was onscreen. She also gets the acid facial treatment.
This film also has a needle attack, a nail gun assault and maiming, but you know what? It just wasn't mean enough. I had absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the bullies. But then I turned against the oddballs because of their emotionless torturing methods. Their revenge simply lacked passion, making them into quite dull "villains."
And Dane, their leader, spends way too much time trying to act and talk like the Jigsaw puppet in the Saw series.
Another huge problem was the lack of nudity or rape.
The women use their hotness as the key weapon in their bullying ways. No one would give a shit about these bimbos if they weren't good looking. Thus, they should have been SEXUALLY tortured! Especially since the outcasts' goal was to emotionally scar the bullies for the rest of their lives.
For example, Heather proudly tells her cohorts about their sexy cop costumes: "They scream, 'We love sex, but not with you.'" What the producers should have done is have Dane say later to her, "This automatic rifle screams, 'I'm gonna love having sex with you, and there's nothing you can do to stop me."
And why the hell wasn't blond bully Kelli (Laura Ashley Samuels) tortured? Or at least naked? She was the hottest of the bunch.
C'mon guys. If you're gonna terrorize your obnoxious and annoying classmates, have some real fun!
The final grade?
C for both the movie and the GIMP scenes.
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