The Final Sacrifice (1990)

Film school is an interesting place.  You get a small amount of money to make as big a film as you can.  It’s basically micro-budgets.  The only thing is that film school normally involves making short films, and with that experience, you can move your way into the bigger budget, longer length feature films that you want to work on.  Those longer movies will take more money to produce because, obviously, they take longer to make.

That’s not always the case, though.  There are some films that get to be an hour or an hour and a half and have budgets comparable to those of the short length student films.  A whole subculture has bloomed out of micro-budget film.  Movies get made for under $5000 all the time that are feature length.  Most of them don’t get seen beyond the people who made them, and their friends.  They tend to rot in someone’s basement.  Some of them get shared around and their audiences grow.  Some of them explode.  Most go nowhere.

The Final Sacrifice, also known as Quest for the Lost City, was one of the films that garnered an audience.  Most of that was due to Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring it in a 1998 episode, but still.  An audience is an audience.  The story was about Troy McGreggor (Christian Malcolm), a young man being hunted by an evil cult.  He teamed up with Zap Rowsdower (Bruce J. Mitchell), a former member of the cult, to take down the people hunting him and restore an ancient city to its former glory.

Movies with low budgets sometimes have a tough time getting made.  Films cost money and when there isn’t much money to go around, that budget can be blown quite easily.  The Final Sacrifice was made for approximately $1500 Canadian in 1990.  Factoring inflation into the picture, that would be about $2500 today.  That’s still not a lot of money.

One lesson I learned in my first year at film school was the concept of “beg, borrow, and steal.”  It might sound a slight bit illegal with that last part.  The idea behind it was meant to make everyone think creatively on where to get the supplies needed for productions.  Beg people to give you things that you need.  If that doesn’t work, beg some more.  Convince them to let you use what they have.  Borrow things from people that you know will lend them to you.  If your uncle has an uninstalled bathtub laying around and you need one for your set, ask if you can borrow it for the production and return it after.  The stealing is slightly more questionable.  It didn’t mean that people can go into stores and take whatever they want without paying.  Don’t ever do that.  That’s shoplifting and is a bad thing that could get you in some major trouble.  But say you’re driving past a house where the fence was blown down and the people decided that instead of reinstalling it, they would throw it out.  Take it from their curb.  Who is going to miss that fence?  They were getting rid of it anyway.

Tjardus Greidanus definitely utilized the “beg, borrow, and steal” method while making The Final Sacrifice.  For one thing, the camera equipment that was used was borrowed from the school he attended, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.  That cut down a good portion of the budget, as the crew didn’t have to pay for the equipment they were using.  Christian Malcolm, who co-wrote the script and starred in the movie, was another student at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.  This meant that he probably didn’t have to be paid for any of the work he did on the project.  The locations were likely a variety of homes owned by the people working on the film, abandoned buildings, and secluded unpopulated outdoor areas where permits didn’t cost money.  With such a low budget, the money couldn’t be thrown away to secure locations that had to be paid for.

Using the “beg, borrow, and steal” mentality, The Final Sacrifice was probably able to write off much of the normal production costs that more professional films have.  This was a student film, remember.  Most of the budget would have been eaten up by the food that was necessary for the cast and crew.  If the movie was done anywhere near normal film standards, that is.  If it wasn’t, then the money could have gone anywhere.  Low budget films are hard to judge like that.  There can be assumptions made about the breakdown of the budget, but without having been there, it’s difficult to tell where it went.  Perhaps it was all used for the special effects and sound effects.  Guns, car crashes, that sort of stuff.  It would all cost money and $1,500 doesn’t go to far.

Low budget filmmaking can be tough.  It can be difficult to get the resources required to make the film you want to make.  This is especially true the longer the film ends up being.  A $1,500 budget in the early 1990s was a small amount of money to make a short film, let alone the feature length picture that The Final Sacrifice was.  The crew should be commended for how well they used that budget and how the film that came out of it wasn’t all that bad.  It wasn’t the pinnacle of high art or anything.  The Final Sacrifice was an entertaining, messy movie.  But it got made, and it wasn’t hard to follow the story.  It was a fun watch.  Tjardus Greidanus did a good job getting his team to make it.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• The Final Sacrifice was suggested to me by @allflicker.
• Have you seen The Final Sacrifice?  What did you think about it?  Was it entertaining, or dull?  Is Zap Rowsdower and awesome name?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• Do you have any suggestions for movies I should be checking out?  Tell me about them on Twitter or in the comments.  I’m always up for some movies I might not know about.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I share bits and pieces of them on my Snapchat.  If that interests you in any way, add me (jurassicgriffin).
• The post for the week after this one is for a movie called Road to Revenge.  That post is also a little late.  Bear with me here while I get caught up.  Thanks, and again, sorry for being late on three of the posts.