Review: Fatal Exam (1990)

Directed by: Jack Snyder
Starring: Mike Coleman, Terry Comer, Carol Carlberg-Snyder
Written by: Jack Snyder
Music by: Carl Leta
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb

Fatal Exam, a regional supernatural slasher filmed in St. Louis, might be the longest 1 hour and 52 minutes ever committed to 16 mm. Writer, director, editor, and producer Jack Snyder never met a mundane moment he didn’t want to film the hell out of. Although the movie purports to be about a group of university students spending the night at a haunted house in which they’re stalked by a scythe-wielding killer, Fatal Exam is actually mostly about a group of university students walking around a drab house for 92 minutes, at the behest of their Rod Serling-sounding college professor, and then feebly battling a scythe-wielding killer for 20.

It’s sort of a fun exercise to sit back and imagine yourself as Mr. Snyder, wondering what he was telling himself as he was on minute six of filming his stars slowly crossing an empty, unassuming courtyard. Did he imagine himself on the verge of a breakthrough in avant-garde filmmaking? Did he forget the camera was still on? Had he purchased a shitload of 16 mm film that he was definitely not going to waste? Was Jack Snyder a serial killer whose weapon of choice was death by a thousand minutes of tedium? The masochist in me wants to believe that there was some ethos, however misguided, at work here. The likely reality that Snyder and his crew just had no concept of what an audience would find watchable isn’t very fun.

But yes, as subtly intimated, Fatal Exam is kind of a chore. As is the DIY horror way, none of the characters with whom we are forced to spend so much time are well-written. But worse, they’re not even accidentally interesting in a way that only a badly written script that doesn’t reflect actual human behavior can deliver. However, there is a scene in which one of the young men discovers a head in the storage cabinet of a coffee table and proclaims in a cacophony of calm yet panicked dubbing, “There’s a fucking head in the coffee table!” He repeats this line with varying cadences and placements of “fucking” over the next 90 to 120 seconds. The coffee table head obviously shook him because he spends the next 30 minutes or so harping on it and reminding his pals, who couldn’t give any fewer shits, of the fucking head in the fucking coffee table.

None of what happens for the first 92 minutes is of any consequence and is barely of any amusement, though there are times when so little happens for so long that your brain phases out of reality and settles into a comatic trance of sorts, lulled in part by the reasonably spooky assortment of music provided by Carl Leta that accompanies literally every second of run time. Leta had his work cut out for him; there are maybe 15 total seconds without some kind of score, presumably to help the audience forget that nothing is ever occurring.

But once you’ve woven in and out of several states of consciousness and finally arrived at Fatal Exam’s climax, there is some treasure to be discovered, including a few decent bits of gore; a terribly wonderful diarrhea explosion of exposition that tries so hard to make sense of this thing; a climactic hand-to-hand battle that, if you squint, could pass as old family home video of you and your brother dueling with empty wrapping paper rolls on a Christmas morning of your childhood; and a fun but incredibly unconvincing stop-motion animated demon. But by then, it’s way too little, much too late. I suppose there’s something kind of admirable about the film’s unflinching dedication to banality, but probably not.

Overall rating: 3.5 out of 10