In
the time-honored tradition of found footage films, replete with the video image
distorting before a jump scare or the subwoofer volume being turned up, things
invariably go from bad to worse. By this
point we’ve seen this film done to death but the distinctly countryside setting
sets it a few millimeters aside from the pack.
The film has decent performances from the ensemble cast with much of the
heavy lifting done by Robin Hill as an ordinary local alcoholic whose
transition from nonchalant documentarian to frightened and determined truth
seeker will briefly brighten the eyes of the few watching this thing.
An attempt at cosmic horror ala the cinema verité aesthete, the film mostly benefits from the atmospheric countryside setting with some sequences purging the cameras through thick dusk fog. The film utilizes claustrophobia in the last half almost as well as some of the tightly quartered moments peppering such found footage phantasmagorias like As Above So Below. Also unique to this found footage spooker are the occasional involvement of gore and/or creepy crawlies like when a videographer stumbles upon a cloak covered in live worms. Otherwise most of what you get here is more than familiar territory in, let's be honest, an oversaturated marketplace full of many almost exactly like this one.
All in all, Final Prayer (aka The Borderlands) is a serviceable at best, unmemorable at worst found footage horror flick that tends to drag its feet in the midsection but provides a startling enough finale to make it all worth the wait. In the pantheon of found footage horror films with some reaching astonishing heights (see Lake Mungo for example) or depressing lows (Unfriended: Dark Web), Final Prayer posits itself somewhere in the middle of above average. You get what you pay for.
--Andrew Kotwicki
