FINAL EXAM (1981)

TOM’S REVIEW:

Watching horror movies for two straight days is hard work. Great death scenes and hilarious dialogue aside, making it through twenty-two horror films in forty-eight hours requires a heroic amount of endurance: wading through incomprehensible character motivations, dissecting convoluted plot lines, and unraveling befuddling narrative arcs take quite a toll on a man. It was thus with a great sigh of relief that we settled down to watch Final Exam, the last ShockJune selection, and a film utterly lacking anything resembling cinematic depth.

First, to the plot: It’s final exam week at a run-of-the-mill American college and everyone is scrambling to be done with the semester. We have the dim-witted frat boys staging elaborate “terrorist-style” raids to help a brother cheat on a test, morally casual strumpets sleeping their way to an A, and a select few pious souls actually buckling down to study. We also have timid pledges tied to trees and covered with ice, lazy security guards blowing off work to go fishing, and duteous nerds organizing athletic equipment at midnight. Peppered amidst these fascinating forays into the world of higher learning are lengthy monologues on the nature of violence in society, an earnest debate concerning the value of beauty over brains, and a tirade against the apparent irrelevance of chemistry in the grand scheme of a comprehensive education. And of course, looming in the background all the while is a cold-blooded killer.

In an admirable and daring approaching to horror moviemaking, the Final Exam killer is endowed with no motivation whatsoever. He’s not an ex-loser taking revenge on those who mocked him; he’s not a jilted lover offing young ladies; he’s not an escaped mental patient stalking and killing far-flung members of his family. He’s just a guy who kills. That’s all. No rhyme, no reason, no motivation, no personality, no back-story, no nothing. He’s just a killer, plain and simple. I do not doubt that there are some moviegoers out there who disparage such a lack of characterization, folks who indulge in horror precisely to experience the seminal thrill that comes from being in close proximity to a fascinatingly complex evildoer. But when you’ve spent two straight days mired in the foul recesses of many a murderistic mind, a cardboard killer is welcomed with open arms.

Of course, if you are desperate for every movie out there, even Final Exam, to have a deeper truth, you could say that the film is a postmodern meditation on the randomness of evil; that the Final Exam world is nothing more than a microcosm of our society, painstakingly constructed to show that ours is a world rife with meaningless death, and that sooner or later, we’re all goners. The killer has no personality because he is everyman, and he has no grudge because being born in this cruel world is enough to justify his actions. You could say all that, and you might even believe it. And if that makes you happy, you have my blessing. As a man with a tendency to overanalyze, overcriticize, and overindulge in most anything relating to horror, however, I prefer to take Final Exam as a breath of fresh, uncomplicated air: a film that makes absolutely no attempt to expand or develop the slasher genre; a picture content to fill its running time with bad jokes, tacky innuendo, and violent death. And for me, after two days of mind-numbing horror, Final Exam was everything I could have hoped for. Thanks for coming everybody, see you all next month.

SHOCKLESSON:
-∑The true test of a relationship is whether or not your beloved will untie you from a tree when you are half-naked and covered with ice.