The Final Sacrifice

as bad if not worse than "overdrawn at the memory bank." There's no hero like Zap rowsdower. In fact there's no hero. No plot either. The ending where Zap looks at his tattoo and it is gone for no apparent reason is great !!!!

Even without the MST3K commentary (which was pee-your-pants-funny) this movie would have had me rolling on the floor with laughter. It's just that ridiculous. But for people without my warped sense of humor, I recommend ONLY the MST3K version. It's one of the best! In fact, I've been known to randomly yell out "Rowsdower!" causing any family members near by to collapse in a fit of giggles and confuse the hell out of everyone else.

I'm sharing this story just because I can: Back when I was in high school I worked at Burger King (aka the 5th Circle of Hell) and the guy who played Rowsdower came in and I took his order. He even paid in Canadian money! (We're so close to the border, a lot of businesses in town take Canadian currency) I called my sister, who also worked there, out to take a look and she swears it was him too. I wanted to get his autograph, but he was eating. My brush with greatness!

"Quest for the Lost City" (or "The Final Sacrifice" as it is more commonly known) features a paper thin plot apparently thought up by a third grader, stunningly icky and sometimes downright ugly characters, and not much else.

This is the story of geeky little Troy, whose dad was an amateur archaeologist who disappeared a few years back whilst seeking The Lost City! Troy finds a map to The Lost City that his dad left behind and soon, ski-mask wearing moose hunters in black tank tops and sweat pants are chasing after him with machetes. We're never really quite sure exactly why these bodybuilders don't want anyone to find out about them, but their boss Satoris - a greasy, creepy looking guy with an impossibly deep voice and a penchant for black trenchcoats and kinky riding crops - gives the orders and no one questions him. Troy hooks up with a lumpy loser name of - get this - Zap Rowsdower. What the hell kind of a name is Zap Rowsdower? I mean, if you were Mrs. Rowsdower, why would you want to curse your son further by naming him Zap, for crying out loud? But, I digress...

Zap used to be a member of the bodybuilders cult, but was tossed out by Satoris, apparently for having a stupider name than him. Zap might also know more about the death of Troy's father than he's willing to admit, but there's no time for that as Troy and Zap meet Mike Pipper, Troy's dad's old partner. Mike is a strange combination of Yosemite Sam and Jethro Tull, and although I suspect he was supposed to be the wise man of the film, filling in plot holes and offering Yoda-like advice, I couldn't stop laughing at him long enough to take him or anything he said seriously. Apparently, while I was laughing, I missed something important, because Troy is kidnapped by Satoris and prepared for The Final Sacrifice! It is now up to Zap to save him and clear his own name in the process.

Yeah, whatever.

This film might have worked better if Troy had instead been an attractive young girl and Zap had been a handsome young man with a less stupid name... and less facial hair and a better wardrobe and less body odor and...well, it would have been predictable as hell, but it would have been more interesting. I mean, wouldn't the gods that Satoris worships be a little cheesed off at being offered such a goofy sacrifice? This is clearly a family project, with the directors close friends and distant cousins trying to pass themselves off as actors, and the director himself trying to pass himself off as a director. Good gods, a full cast and crew actually wasted an entire sunny weekend making this pile of moose dung. And yet, I found myself rather amused by it all. It's one of my favorite MST3K episodes and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's the silly names, maybe it's the simplicity of the plot (which reminded me of stories I wrote when I was a dumb kid) maybe I'm secretly attracted to guys with cavernous noses and really stupid names, I don't know. But I liked it. It was just bad enough to be somewhat amusing and was kind of like watching a wrestling match filmed outdoors. I give it a 3 on a scale of 10, and I'm feeling generous today.

Watch the MST3K version if you must watch it at all.

Here it is, folks, a movie that is one hundred percent "deus ex machina." Roger Ebert speaks of the Idiot Plot, or a story that goes on because the characters are too stupid to resolve it. "Quest of the Lost City/The Final Sacrifice" (pick your poison) goes one better: the characters are too stupid to keep the plot moving, but it does anyway through sheer coincidence and dumb luck.

So we've got this scrawny kid named Troy, who as our story begins is rummaging through some junk his late father left behind (Dad, we learned in the pre-credit sequence, got shot seven years ago by a group of thugs in ski masks). Troy uncovers what someone on the production design team thought looked like a mysterious and ancient map. No sooner does he locate the map than the ski-mask thugs break into his house and demand it, having apparently taken seven years to accomplish the rather simple task of finding the dead guy's address and/or family. The thugs are led by a pale guy named Satoris. Satoris wears black and speaks in a deep voice. Presumably this makes him scary; in truth it makes him look like Professor Snape's third cousin and sound like a bad Darth Vader impersonator.

Troy elludes the thugs by hopping into the back of a rusty pickup truck, driven by the boozy and bitter Zap Rowsdower. (Why is he named Zap Rowsdower? My guess is the writer was going for a cool, memorable name like "Indiana Jones" and failed miserably.) Rowsdower happens to know a lot about the thugs (a cult bent on world domination, we are informed), having been one of their number some years back. Apparently, if you are being pursued by a cult and jump into the back of a random vehicle, odds are pretty good that the driver of the vehicle will be a former member of the cult, whose seeming reluctance to help you will conceal a real empathy for your plight.

So Troy and Rowsdower flee the cultists, until Rowsdower's truck unsurprisingly breaks down, thus ending their journey. BUT WAIT! Troy goes off in search for water, and in his random trek comes across a distinct rock formation. The rock formation is on the map! Rowsdower's truck must have read the script, since it conveniently broke down within an easy walking distance of one of the map's landmarks. There's also a tunnel with a copy of the map painted on one of the walls (why don't the cultists just look there?), and a translation guide belonging to Troy's father (which has held up pretty well despite seven years in a damp tunnel). But they can't stay to linger, since the cult has finally caught up with them, so it's off to another chase sequence.

Zap and Troy hide out in a weathered cabin, elluding the cultists and ending the chase. BUT WAIT! The owner of the cabin is none other than Troy's dad's old partner Mike Pipper, hiding in the wilderness from the cult these seven years (cue dramatic music). Pipper looks like a very seedy Jim Henson, and talks like a cross between Yosemite Sam and (speaking of Henson) the "News Flash" guy from the Muppet Show. He also provides more backstory on the cult, who are survivors of a race called the Ziox. Apparently the Ziox started worshipping an evil idol and were punished by having their city sink into the earth, proving that the Ziox have read up on "Great Flood" archetypes and the myth of Atlantis. Satoris wants to sacrifice someone to the idol in order to become invincible, despite Pipper's assertion that the idol isn't located where the map says it is. Pipper also drops a warning in Troy's ear about Zap: "He was with Satoris the night your father was killed." Troy's so shocked he doesn't even bother to ask how Pipper knows this, since a) all the cultists wear ski masks and b) nobody else was around when it happened.

So, somehow Satoris manages to kidnap Troy and take him to the location of the lost city--proving that he did not need the map at all, despite breaking in Troy's door earlier--where the idol waits, having eluded Pipper's searches. (I'm guessing Satoris carts the idol around with him, keeping it in a storage locker in between rituals) Rowsdower pursues, there's a fight, Satoris is killed (don't ask me how) and the Ziox city pops up out of the ground. And all ends well, except for Troy's aunt and caretaker who didn't know about any of this and had a heart attack when she came home to find her house trashed and her nephew missing. Well, maybe not. But it could have happened.

One final note: This film was made in Canada, but I cannot bring myself to ridicule my neighbors to the north because of it. After all, one who lives in a country which has produced "Battlefield Earth" should not throw stones.

As far as abysmally crappy movies go, The Final Sacrifice isn't so bad. Sure, it's technically inept in just about every way, features horrible dialogue, and doesn't have a character in the entire film with a realistic name (the fact that the director signs his checks "Tjardus Greidanus" goes a long way towards explaining this phenomena), but it's got something most films in its class lack: heart. I'd say Greidanus is akin to the famous Ed Wood, in that he shows not a shred of talent but at least seemed to believe in what he did. Rather than slapping a recycled costume on an assistant director and creating yet another lame, lousy creature feature with an insipid story, he tried to create something original, new, and interesting. He failed miserably, but at least he tried.

The plot revolves around a pre-Internet nerd named Troy, who, apparently, spends his time digging stuff out of the attic that relates to his father's death somehow, stares at it for a while, and then gives up on figuring out what happened and just puts it all away again. He lucks out when a ski-masked cult randomly decides to come looking for a map that leads to a lost city, even though they could have come any time in the seven years prior but for some reason decided to let him grow old enough to somehow thwart their entire incompetent organization with the help of a beer-guzzling, mullet-endowed drifter...but I get ahead of myself.

So anyway, Troy is forced to go outside the house for the first time in a decade and somehow winds up in the truck bed of the aforementioned drifter, who manages to deliver his name, Zap Rowsdower, with a straight face. Even the nerdy kid understands how embarrassing it is to call a grown man "Zap," so he (repeatedly) refers to him as "Rowsthdower," which isn't really much of an improvement. Anyhow, some other stuff happens, involving a gray-bearded, oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-people-like-this-actually-exist-type character named Mike Pipper, who explains some less-than-interesting exposition explaining what they're up against and what's at stake--the world, of course! After looking thoroughly unconcerned, our heroes, though they couldn't pool together enough mental resources to open a can of tuna (though Rowsdower has a lot of experience opening cans...of beer...), find a way to overthrow the muscleheaded cult, defeat the villainous Satoris (a man with a voice deeper than the lead singer of Type O Negative), knock over a pole, raise the lost cardboard miniature of Ziox, and save all of Canada, acting like it's some sort of major accomplishment all the while. The movie ends with an inspiring shot of Troy and Zap in the Zapmobile, going somewhere for some reason. My bet is that it involved beer and cheese.