I’d Rather Take a Test

The 1980s were a special time for slasher films. The burgeoning slasher genre was kicked into gear with Black Christmas and then Halloween, and it proved to studios two important things. One, people wanted to see coeds get cut down by an evil killer and, two, horror films based around special days on the calendar were big business. Many, many slasher films released in the early 1980s followed this formula, not only with more HalloweenThe franchise that both set the standard for Slasher horror and, at the same time, defied every convention it created, Halloween has seen multiple time lines and reboots in its history, but one thing has remained: Michael Myers, the Shape that stalks Haddonfield. films to follow the original as well as a plethora of Friday the 13thOne of the most famous Slasher film franchises, the Friday the 13th series saw multiple twists and turn before finally settling on the formula everyone knows and loves: Jason Voorhees killing campers 'round Camp Crystal Lake. films released practically once a year, but also films like My Bloody Valentine, New Year’s Evil, Prom Night, Bloody Birthday, Sweet Sixteen, Graduation Day, and more (many of which we’ve reviewed on this site). We could spend months going over all the slashers tied to special occasions. And, hell, we probably will.

Slotting neatly into this collective sub-genre of slashers is Final Exam, a film about the last day of school at a college where, yes, all the students are taking their various final exams. The title is generic enough that you can sense what the producers were wanting – “crap, we need a day that’s important but all the good ones are already taken” – but it’s also just broad enough that, somehow, it doesn’t feel as interesting or special as many of the, other “special occasion slashers” we’ve seen before. It’s kind of a lazy premise to build a slasher around.

Which is fine since Final Exam is also a pretty damn lazy slasher. It has all the standard tropes that, even in 1981, were already starting to calcify. The need to not drink or have sex, the killer going after anyone that sins, the wanton sex and nudity, the idiot characters, the final girl. Honestly, if you slapped a mask on the killer and sent these people out into the woods, you’d have a Friday the 13th film. Not a very good one, I’ll admit, but then most of the Friday the 13th films weren’t very good either. Still, this is a subpar slasher trying to capitalize on the genre while it was hot, and even then it doesn’t do that good a job of it.

The film opens with a girl and her boyfriend, hanging out in his car, making out. She wants to go somewhere else, but he doesn’t want to pay for a hotel. His cheapness gets the best of both of them when a mysterious killer breaks into their car and slashes both of them. This killing makes the news but otherwise doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on the students of nearby Lanier College. There, the students are preparing for their final exams. Some, like good student Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi), study hard to try and get good grades, while others like frat boys Wildman (Ralph Brown) and Mark (John Fallon) cheat their way through the exams.

But that killer is still out there, and he has his sights set on Lanier College. After slowly driving onto campus, he takes his time stalking the various students, getting a lay of the land. Then, as night falls, he strikes, taking out one student after another, finding them when they’re alone and vulnerable, using his knife to stab them, over and over, until the campus starts running out of students. Can Courtney, our obvious final girl, survive the night, or will she end up just another victim of this mysterious murderer?

Final Exam feels like a slasher film put together by a committee. It has all the hallmarks of the genre without any of the knowledge about how to make it scary. It hits all the familiar beats, technically, but it does so in an inept and uninteresting way. The end result is a film that tries so hard to emulate and copy the beats of other, better slasher films but does so in a way that isn’t scary in the slightest. Everyone on the committee saw what they wanted to steal, and they threw all those ideas into the pot. They just didn’t think to hire a director that knew how to make it happen.

Take the killer (played by Timothy L. Raynor), for example. He’s shrouded in mystery, with us never learning anything about him. Who is he? Why does he kill? What’s his motivation? None of that is ever revealed. He’s a vague shape, not unlike Michael Myers, except with one key difference: he’s just a dude. We see him wandering around campus, stalking the coeds, moseying around in jeans and a green windbreaker, but there’s nothing iconic about his look. He does the same stuff Michael Myers does, just without the William Shatner mask or the imposing form.

Hell, Myers even had more development in the first film than we see from this dude. Michael gets an opening sequence devoted to him, at a young age, killing his sister. Then we have his doctor, Loomis, talking about how he’s pure evil. We never learn why he kills, but they do an effective job of illustrating how this character, who never speaks, can be a dark and evil killer. But the dude in Final Exam is just a dude, a guy wandering around his windbreaker, killing just because, we have to assume. No story, no development, no mask. He’s just a guy, and that’s not scary.

The kills in the film are also lacking. We have a killer walking around with a knife, which in and of itself isn’t the scariest weapon to be wielded by a killer. It certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Jason’s machete, nor is it anywhere near as interesting as Freddy’s claws (which debuted a couple of years later). And the fact is that the killer uses that knife a lot. He’s a very stabby guy, preferring it over just about anything else he could use. He does strangle one guy with some wire, and that’s practically improv when it comes to what this killer does. Mostly it’s stab, stab, stab.

Not that we get to see much. Final Exam was produced on a tiny budget (only $363,000) so the producers had to do a lot to work around the lack of money. There’s very little gore, almost no blood at all, and the kills play out a lot like a romantic scene in a sitcom, with the camera quickly tilting away, hiding the actual death. Even when we see the body afterwards it’s usually bloodless, barely even looking dead. We need a bit more from slasher kills.

Now, I’m not saying kills have to be gory affairs, but if you’re not going to go for gore then at the very least you need to develop mood and scares. Here, too, Final Exam doesn’t really know what to do. Each kill has the same setup: student walks out across campus at night, the killer magically appears wherever they are, and then after a bit of running, the coed gets stabbed. Often, the actual kill is completely improbable. In one instance, a student flees the killer, running around the outside of a building, locking a door behind them and heading down a one-way hallway into a closet. There’s absolutely no way the killer could possibly get ahead of them considering circumstances, and yet, from a trash can in the back of the closet, the killer bursts out as if they’ve been waiting there the whole time. It’s so ridiculously stupid, stretching all credulity.

The killer is magical, and can just be wherever the director and writer wanted no matter if it makes sense or not. When Jason or Freddy does that it’s fine because we accept that they’re magical killers, back from the grave and out for revenge. But, again, the killer in Final Exam is just some guy. There is nothing special about him. He doesn’t have some tragic backstory that establishes how he has power or somehow comes back from the dead. He’s a dude in a green windbreaker that drives around campus trolling for coeds to kill. He’s just a guy.

In short, nothing about this film works. It’s an utter slog to get through, with a ton of time spent on watching coeds walk around campus, going to class and taking tests, all while the killer slowly stalks them. It’s boring. And then, when we get to the kills, they don’t work. Final Exam is an hour and a half work of utter tedium, made to capitalize on the genre that was so hot at the moment, but no one on the crew knew what the hell they were doing. Slasher movies were big business for a few years in the early 1980s until the market burned itself out, and films like Final Exam are why that genre burned out so fast, so quickly.