In honor of Horror Hound magazine's awesome tribute to all things 1981 in their latest issue, I decided to finally check out some of the titles I've had for a while, but have somehow managed to avoid.
Where do I start with this "gem"?
Lanier College in Anywhere, USA is coming upon the end of its system where...wait for it...final exam(s) are taking place. One of the local frats pulls a pretty insane prank (I'll get to that in a little bit), which sets up the school nerd/tattletale/over-achiever/self-appointed genius Raddish, to become a whistle blower for all things abnormal. Of course the joke's on him because of the prank and now the frat wants to rough him up a bit and the backwoods sheriff accuses him of being a Boy Who Cried Wolf. Man...this kid can't get a break. Suddenly, students start dropping like flies and the bodies start piling up. Will Raddish call the cops again and risk looking like a fool? Will he survive his Final Exam?
Things start off promising with some cool, grainy cinematography.
Alright, so the poster looks kinda cool despite the obvious Friday the 13th ripoff. Maybe the killer is wearing some sort of cool mask that will make up for whatever shortcomings the movie might have . . .
Nah, he's a Gerard Depardieu stunt double wearing an olive drab Army longsleeve, a pair of jeans, and your average, shit-kicker work boots. Hardly impressive, right? Maybe he's got a cool backstory or some insane motive for knocking off all these stupid college students . . .
Nah, he just comes and goes with the wind. Dude doesn't even have a name for crying out loud!! I guess maybe writer/director Jimmy Huston was trying to channel the creepiness of Michael Myers' "killer with no motive"/pure eeeeee-vil vibe . . . but failed miserably.
Ladies and gentlemen: our killer.
Honestly, the only thing the killer can do well in Final Exam is catch arrows with bare hands and ride a dumbwaiter standing up(seriously!). The kills are pretty unimaginative and the gore is nowhere to be found except for some blood coming out of a victim's mouth or appearing on their face when their body turns in the last reel.
Raddish, as played by Joel Rice, should be the example of the type of character every Horror character shouldn't be. He's whiny, nerdy beyond words (the kid friggin' announces "I can't help it! I'm a genius!" when he finishes a final exam before the rest of the class) and probably wouldn't even be able to make friends with someone as annoying as Encyclopedia Brown. There's one scene where he visits a female character who's stressing about boys . . . to give her the sort of pep talk Stuart Smalley would blush over. Dude...and I'll only say this once: she's stressing about a guy who's being a butthole -- her defenses are down. Make your move! Give her that shoulder to cry on and those arms to hold her. But yeah . . . poor Raddish comes off like a
nerd prototype for "Degrasi, Jr High" (the original one). Dude gets what he deserves.
Somewhere, Jack Torrance is proud. I guess.
One of the things Huston tries to do to make Final Exam stand out from other slasher pictures of the times is focus more on the kids . . . er, college students. I'll give him an "A" for effort, but the execution is so terribly boring that it really makes the movie become bad ABC After School Special with "some" scenes from an amatuer slasher movie thrown in. There is so much time spent trying to develop the characters (none of which can really act all that well) that I forgot I was watching an '80s slasher movie!!
Remember that prank the frat pulls that I mentioned earlier? Yeah, well, speaking of forgetting which movie you're watching . . . early on, the killer is driving around in a black van, right? Not too long after this is established, another van -- which is brown and clearly doesn't look anything like the other one -- roles onto campus. Did the killer decide to switch vans? Did the production think no one would notice that they banged up the director's Uncle Seymor's van and figured the audience wouldn't noticed if they replaced it with a brown one?
The head-scratching continues when dudes in ski-masks, brandishing M-16's hop out and start mowing people down. Seriously.
Somebody better call The A-Team because some dollar store terrorists are shooting up the local college.
So Final Exam just turned into Kent State? I'm confused.
Oh wait . . . it's just the frat pulling a prank way too elaborate for their star keg-stander, Wild Man, to execute. They grab the "bodies" of the two kids who fall victim to their gunfire and drive off with them. Is this some sort of hazing prank, part of Hell Week? Oh, it's all a distraction so the lead frat guy can switch write a passing score on his final exam and waltz out of the building like he just finished his test.
Sure, the movie is pretty confusing, but you wanna know the single most insane bit about Final Exam? The DVD is currently out of print and copies of it are going for ridiculous prices on ebay and Amazon.
Go ahead and do a search right now. I'll wait.
Forget it, I'll show you myself.
Nuts, isn't it?
Yup. That's the body of a dumb jock stuffed into that skinny locker.
Anyway, this movie is pretty terrible and those who know me know that some of my favorite movies are pieces of trash. But man . . . this one sucks so hard. Skip it!
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