Review: Final Exam (1981)
Directed by: Jimmy Huston
Starring: Cecile Bagdadi, Joel S. Rice, DeAnna Robbins
Written by: Jimmy Huston
Music by: Gary S. Scott
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Scream Factory)
IMDb
Although writer/director Jimmy Huston’s Final Exam was released right in the middle of the Golden Age of the slasher film, it’s doing something a bit different. Huston makes the brave choice to cast aside the beheadings, disembowelments, genital mutilations, ample fornications, extraneous shower scenes, and foreboding mystery around the killer’s identity usually employed by his colleagues. As a result, this flick, about a bunch of college students studying for their final exam who end up hunted by a killer, can be a laborious affair.
Though there’s less focus on the sordid goings on at a college campus ridden with impetuous and horny young adults and their bloodthirsty stalkers, Final Exam does excel in a couple of areas that differentiate it from the slasher field. Primarily, Huston invests some time and energy into character development, to such a degree that there’s a very long stretch in the middle in which nothing’s really happening except pleasant banter between the students (and a frat-initiated faux school shooting that has aged like a jug of milk in a dumpster in August). Though the script falls short of making anyone legitimately interesting, everyone’s pretty A-OK, more well-meaning than you expect from college kids, and a couple layers deeper than typical murder fodder. The two main women, Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi) and her roommate Lisa (DeAnna Robbins), are adorable and amiable. Campus nerd “Radish” (Joel S. Rice) is sympathetic and just barely on the right side of nebbish. All in all, these folks are more tolerable than the louts usually thrust upon you, whose deaths you beckon beneath your breath.
Secondly, Gary S. Scott’s score is one of the best written for a slasher, a subgenre known for its reliance on music. His creepy, icy piano-laced cues are up there with stuff like Carpenter’s immortal score for Halloween (1978), Ralph Jones’ lo-fi gothic bombast in The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), or Richard Band’s darkly whimsical work on The House on Sorority Row (1982). Although not a ton actually happens through most of the runtime, Scott’s crawling, menacing arpeggios, combined with Huston’s assured direction and fairly keen eye for ominous trappings, keep you thinking something horrible’s bound to occur at any moment.
Although I like Final Exam more than a lot of people, I can’t quite report that its emphasis on characterization and atmosphere over the core slasher principles is a success. The film does its well-intentioned best to mask the lack of stabby-stabs but eventually you’ll wonder whether there’s to be any goddamn slashing in this slasher. When the slashes finally occur, they’re rote and carried out not by a deformed psychopath with a terrifying mask and a twisted, tragic backstory but a husky guy with a mullet and a barn coat who can catch arrows with his bare hands. Dude has no name, no relation to anyone he’s impaled or choked, and no discernible motivation. He’s just a guy who enjoys stabbing college kids who really needed a B+ on their American History final. None of this is spoilery since his boring-ass face is shown pretty early on. He’s Russ Thorn without the swag full-body denim or phallic symbolism.
Long story shorter: Jimmy Huston knows how to sow and sustain suspense but no clue how to pay it off. As a result, Final Exam ends up an aggravatingly “fine” slasher on the precipice of something so much better.
Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10
