What if Faber College had been terrorized by more than just frat boys and food fights? What if Otter and Boon had been brutally murdered instead of going on double secret probation?
Lanier College is about to go on holiday(?) and the Final Exam of the session is currently being taken by kids all over campus. A school fraternity fakes a campus rampage shooting and kidnapping in order to 1) get one of the star football players off campus and 2) allow the star quarterback to cheat on his history final. Another student sees what he believes in a real shooting and calls the police. The local sheriff is called and isn’t very happy to find out that it was all an apparent prank.
Now that exams are done, Lanier College is virtually empty. A few students stay behind for some unknown reasons and it might be the biggest mistake of their lives. Unbeknownst to them, there is an actual killer stalking and brutally murdering kids. As the kids try to alert the sheriff again, and this time for a real emergency, he is quick to blow it off in a “boy who cried wolf” sort of way. The remaining students that aren’t oblivious to what is happening quickly realize they need to take care of this on their own, or at the very least, fight to survive.
This is one of those horror movies that is the hardest for me to review. Part of me wants to pan the movie for being poor in just about every respect. The other part of me realizes that one of my favorite horror movies of all time is Friday the 13th Part VI which is full of the same campy (no pun intended) humor, bad acting, and gore.
Final Exam never explains why, or who the killer is or his motivations. I sort of respect that, honestly. The worst and scariest killers have no motive and just kill to kill. You don’t need the backstory of Jason or Michael Myers when you can just rack up the body count like this guy. It also spends WAY more time trying to develop the characters than just about any “one-off” horror flick I’ve seen. The problem is that even after that attempt is made, I still couldn’t care about any of the characters. If you are a person that watches slasher movies for the terrible characters getting offed in fun and interesting ways, this is not the place to go. Most of the kills are just average run-of-the-mill stab deaths or kills off-screen. In other words, it’s kinda just… boring.
Final Exam attempts to cash in on the early 80s slasher film genre as it was just being truly established. While it does have some pretty stiff competition and doesn’t quite reach or exceed those other films it does have some quality bits. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything interesting to be had here, and that is probably the most damaging thing about the film. I guess if there is nothing else to watch and you have to have a movie on, you can probably do worse than Final Exam. I give it a C-.
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