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Main Cast: Aljona Yakimenko, Peter Inoka
Director: Jozsef Gallai
So I guess this is what passes for found footage these days? Christ, I hope not!
THE FINAL FRAME is a 2025 movie written and directed by Jozsef Gallai, whose IMDB page says he is “best known for his found footage films, mysterious storylines and surprise endings.”
Well, there was nothing mysterious about this one, it’s an hour and 8 minutes of footage through the lens of Peter (Peter Inoka) who follows women around, sneaks into their apartments, manhandles their belongings, then leaves again. One of the women (Aljona Yakimenko), he returns to her place a handful of times. The idea is that Peter is a stalker or serial killer looking for his next victim.
For all we know, every woman he targets winds up in a shallow grave somewhere.
Unfortunately the truth of THE FINAL FRAME is so much less interesting, maybe because we go 56 minutes of this already-short movie with absolutely no dialogue and we’re just watching Peter piddle around in other people’s apartments that entire time with no real plot or character development. We ASSUME he’s the villain and these women are his possible targets. We assume that because we’re given absolutely nothing to contradict that assumption, and by the time we find out what’s really going on, we’ve stopped caring. After an hour, knowing we’ve only got about 10 minutes left, I don’t think there was any scenario Gallai could have revealed that would have made this movie worth the time spent.
Going in, I thought for about a second that this was an interesting choice, seeing everything from the killer’s POV, but that eventually we’d get some dialogue, some other characters, and some action other than him picking up a hairbrush and setting it back down. But halfway in I still hadn’t seen anything worth mentioning. Then I realized no, this isn’t a bold choice in how to set your found footage movie apart, this is a movie made by a person who has no idea what found footage movies are. They’re “found footage”, in that what we see was recorded by a character in the movie and we’re seeing their recording. But found footage movies, whatever the reason they’ve concocted for why everything is being recorded, they still have a STORY. If there’s a story to THE FINAL FRAME, I completely missed it, and I am never going back again to see if I pick it up on a rewatch. Life is too short!
I found this movie on Screamify, a new horror streaming service I subscribed to recently. Their claim to fame is that their monthly price of $2.99 will never go up, and if THE FINAL FRAME is any indication of the kind of movies they’re charging that outrageous amount for, I want my money back. Hell, I’ll just go watch Tubi; it’s free with commercials, but at least even the worst stuff I’ve found on there has personality, and as Samuel L. Jackson informed us, personality goes a long way.
I will try more Screamify movies—I’ve already paid for the month, and this movie was definitely NOT me getting my money’s worth, so they are going to earn that $2.99 no matter how many movies I have to watch to do it—but this first impression did not leave me with a lot of hope. Seriously, if I want to watch a guy’s hands rifle through a woman’s underwear drawer I’ll go to my bedroom and put my wife’s laundry away. For free.
Now back to that other trait of Gailli’s movies, those surprise endings. Was this ending a surprise? Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less. I was just glad the drudgery was over. I’ve seen a lot of movies that I felt were a waste of time, but my God they had nothing on THE FINAL FRAME. I did have a moment in the beginning where I wondered if I should wait for my wife to watch this with her—we like to watch found footage movies together—but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t; she probably would have left me if I’d made her watch this garbage.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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