Final Exam
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Movie Reviews of Final Exam
Movie Review: ''I JUST LOVE THESE 80'S B-FLICKS...KEEP EM' COMING!!''
Summary: 3 Stars
WOW...WHEN I DISCOVERED THAT THIS LITTLE B-FLICK WAS COMING OUT ON DVD...I WAS SO EXCITED. IT'S SOOO FUNNY BECAUSE I WAS GOING TO PULL OUT MY VHS COPY..(STILL IN MINT CONDITION)..AND TAKE A RETRO-TRIP BACK TO THIS FLAT,GENERIC CARBON COPY OF 'HALLOWEEN'. SEE, I'M AN 80'S GUY...TOTALLY OBSESSED WITH ANYTHING FROM THE 70'S AND 80'S...I GUESS YOU JUST HAVE TO OF BEEN THERE TO GET IT....IT'S NOT THAT THESE MOVIES REALLY 'EXCITE ME'...WELL, YEA THEY DO (!!)...BUT IT IS ALSO A THROW BACK TO MY YOUNGER YEARS....AND, I GUESS 'THESE' FORGOTTEN B-MOVIES MUST APPEAL TO A DECENT SIZE CROWD BECAUSE THEY KEEP ON BRINGING THEM OUT ON DVD. MANY WHO WATCH THIS, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNGER GENERATION TODAY WILL PROBABLY BE VERY 'BORED' OR 'IMPATIENT'....BECAUSE THIS SLASHER YARN IS BASCIALLY 'HALLOWEEN' WITH ALL THE ENERGY AND COLOR DRAINED OUT!! IT'S 'THE BOOGEYMAN' WITH OUT JOHN CARPENTER'S CREEPY TECHNO THEME..OR STYLE..OR INTERESTING CHARACTERS...HELL, BUT IT BASICALLY GOES IN THE SAME DIRECTION..SOME SCENES ARE ACTUALLY 'SHOT' AND 'PLAYED OUT' THE SAME WAY..( THE 'SMART' GIRL STARTS TO SEE A 'SHADOWY FIGURE' OUT THE WINDOW...THE FINAL CHASE SCENE HAS HER AND THE PSYCHO FACE-OFF ON A DARKEN STAIRWELL)....BUT PLEASE KEEP IN MIND...THIS WAS 'EARLY 80'S' AND THOUGH IT IS 'DULL'...IT STILL LOOKS DECENT AND HAS SOME EFFECT. WATCH IT JUST FOR THE 'HISTORY AND FACT' THAT THIS IS THE 'REAL' DEAL...ONE OF A HANDFUL OF EARLY SLASHER FLICKS THAT PUT THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN....AND ENDED THE 'BODYCOUNT' MOVIE FOR GOOD...(AT LEAST TILL MUCH LATER). THE BIG BUDGET 'SLASHERS' YOU SEE NOW ARE ALL 'RELATED' TO THESE OLD GEMS..) I WOULD OF NEVER EVER IMAGINED A RE-MAKE OF 'BLACK CHRISTMAS'...OR..'PROM NIGHT'...? I CAN'T WAIT TO WATCH 'FINAL EXAMS'...AND I WILL 'KEEP THE LIGHTS' ON...ONLY BECAUSE THOSE CHILDHOOD FEARS WILL START TO CREEP INTO MY IMAGINATION,BESIDES..I WANT TO SEE THAT 'FINAL CLASSIC' CHASE SCENE AT THE END,ESPECIALLY WHERE THE 'GIRL' GETS TRAPPED IN THE SCHOOL CAFETERIA..I THINK SHE 'STUFFS' HERSELF...? OR TRIES TO HIDE IN THE SMALL 'TRASH' COMPACTOR..WHERE ALL THE DIRTY DISHES GO...?..SOMETHING LIKE THAT...I CAN'T WAIT TO 'EXPERIENCE IT' ALL OVER AGAIN...ESPECIALLY WIDE-SCREEN..! I ALSO PRE-ORDERED 'SWEET SIXTEEN'...ANOTHER SLASHER,BUT MORE OF A MYSTERY. THIS 'SLEEPER' STARRS DANA KIMMEL FROM 'FRIDAY THE 13TH pt 3' AND DON SHANKS WHO PLAYED MICHAEL MYERS IN HALLOWEEN 5..I think...! ANYWAY...IT'S A KOOL LITTLE FILM..IF YOU'RE INTO 'SLICE AND DICE' OLDIES...AND CAN KEEP AN OPEN MIND WHILE VIEWING IT. WATCH WITH SOME FRIENDS WHO CAN APPERICATE 'HORROR MOVIES' AT IT'S MOST PRIMITIVE...OTHER 'CLASSIC' SLASHERS THAT HOLD VERY DEAR TO MY HEART IS....'ONE DARK NIGHT', 'THE INITIATION', 'THE BOOGINS', 'MOTHER'S DAY', 'HE KNOWS YOUR ALONE', 'THE BURNING', 'TO ALL A GOODNIGHT', 'TERROR TRAIN', 'HALLOWEEN 2'..'HALLOWEEN 3', 'HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW','MORTUARY' 'THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD-AKA-PRANKS', 'THE PROWLER', AND MY MOST BELOVED- 'TOBE HOOPERS THE FUNHOUSE!!'' THANX FOR READING.....KEVIN BRIAN....where the BODYCOUNT CONTINUES.......Movie Review: Right Time at the Wrong Time
Summary: 3 Stars
Were at Lanier College the pranks are going strong and the pledge people are taking a dive in their wrong way.A college student very nice nieve type of guy ( Radish)calls the sherif and strongly reports a rampage of gangsters shooting a bunch of students around the outside grounds of the school ,it turns out to be a prank by these college punks.Little do they know a psyco killer is on the urge of gathering his college pranksters in his reality way. So crying wolf begins again when Radish reacts strongly on the phone but back fires at the wrong time.Yes this budget of a film is a slasher to get even.To me this story seems like a typical horror suspense type of action.It makes you think of the character whos crazy it doesnt get to the point if this maniac went to this college.He could of been a student or a crazy professor.This film has its romantic ways of college girls getting what they want for good grades,a type of real know it all macho guys that feel they own the campus and get their nightmare at the end.This film rolls to its climax as a sweet college student fights for her life to get even with the maniac when all her dear friends are plemished.A film like this compare to others Ive seen end off with a strong individual woman that survives.Shes passive but strong willed.Low buget you bet it is!But a good story.I recomend mostly.Movie Review: often boring, bottom-of-the-barrel slasher film
Summary: 2 Stars
I first saw FINAL EXAM in the 1980s in Forest Hills, NY's Continental Theater. Back then the poster's tag line was: "They survived four years of college, but will they survive the ... FINAL EXAM!"
I thought it was okay then. I bought it on Beta and watched it every five or six years, though FINAL EXAM loses its appeal over time. I now rented the DVD from the library, and yes, it's a bad film.
Why do I watch it? I'm a hardcore horror fan, and often prefer a poor horror film to a new film of some other genre.
That said, this is one of the more boring 1980s slasher films. It opens with the slasher killing a college couple in a car. Then a prank killing. Then ... nothing happens. Not until we're nearly 55 minutes into the film.
That's too long for nothing to happen. Yet for the film's first two thirds, FINAL EXAM focuses on the hijinks of some nondescript college kids. The Slut, the Ditsy Girl, the Good Girl, the Nerdy Guy, and two Frat Jocks. They're not interesting; their dialog and situations are pedestrian (e.g., frat initiation pranks, stealing a test paper, etc.).
After 55 minutes, the killings start up and continue at a fast pace until the end. But that's too long to wait, unless you have an interesting story or characters, which FINAL EXAM lacks.
Even worse, the slasher is boring. One of the most nondescript slashers I've ever seen, right down there with that slasher from HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE, and with even less motivation.
And we see his face. Bad move. A strong slasher should be enigmatic, not nondescript. Jason and Myers wear masks.
FINAL EXAM's slasher is a pudgy, silent guy in his late 20s or early 30s. We learn nothing about him. Not even a news report about an escape asylum patient. The Nerdy Guy says anyone can wake up one day and decide to kill, so maybe the slasher's ordinariness is intentional, but it doesn't work.
FINAL EXAM mistakenly violates the mask rule, but it follows other slasher film rules. The slasher has superhuman strength, easily killing a bigger frat guy. There's also a Last Girl. (It's the Good Girl, of course.)
I don't know why the DVD is so expensive. The transfer is decent, but not perfect. Sometimes the film jiggles, and there are occasional dirty spots.
FINAL EXAM was shot on North Carolina's E.O. Studios, which also gave us HOUSE OF DEATH.
Special Features include interviews with three of the actors, which is nice.
But hold off until the price comes down. FINAL EXAM is not an historic or seminal slasher film, nor even a very good one. Only slasher film completists will enjoy it to any degree.
Movie Review: Could have been groundbreaking, but no one picked up on it.
Summary: 2 Stars
Final Exam (Jimmy Huston, 1981)
The best thing about Final Exam is a spoiler, and so I can't really come right out and say it, but it's something that really, really confused me when I first saw it back in the day and really, really impresses me now. It's something that I can't remember any other slasher film doing, before or since. Which if you think about it is pretty darned impressive. That's not to say this is a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly makes it memorable. I hadn't seen it, before a few nights ago, in something like twenty-five years, and I still remembered a great deal about it. (Of course, this could be because I also still had the novelization of the movie, and read it obsessively in seventh and eighth grades; for that matter, I may still have my copy around here somewhere, as beaten-up as it must be by now.) One way or the other, though, it was much as I remembered it, though now dated and seeming somewhat cliché now that I have a larger grasp on the history of slasher movies than I did in the early eighties. Back then, I'd only seen two or three. I don't want to think about how many I've seen now...
Plot: it's time for finals (actually, I could swear that in a few places, they say it's actually midterms, but I guess Midterm Exam didn't quite have the same ring to it) at a small college in the middle of nowhere. A killer struck (in the movie's opening scene) at another college just down the road, which has got everyone pretty keyed up as well, which isn't helped when the local numbskull fraternity plays a practical joke that sends some of the more gullible students scurrying for the cops. (Cue obvious "boy who cried wolf" subplot.) Of course, the killer has migrated, and starts picking off some of the last students left on campus, as most have already gone home for break.
It's your typical slasher, except for that one thing (the question you're left with at the end of the movie? Yeah, that one thing), so don't go into it looking for any revelations vis-a-vis the acting, camerawork, score, or anything else; it's very typical of its subspecies in every other way. Still, that one thing does make it well worth your time if you're even a casual fan of the slasher movie, so in that case, you should probably hunt it down. **
Movie Review: Decent Movie, No Motive
Summary: 2 Stars
Really would have been nice to know why the psycho killer was psycho killing. For instance, was that his daughter or sister who killed herself the year before because she did not get accepted into a fraternity? And by the way, who really cares? Now if her boyfriend , whom she worshiped had dumped her because she was not a member of a female sibling fraternity and he has to stay in his father and gf fraternity, now that would have been a motive for the killer after she killed herself. Recognizing that this is a late 70s to early 80s film, it wasn't that bad. For Jason's first few sequels his motive was that he did not want anyone at Camp Crystal Lake. Michael Myers was hunting his sister and his neice that, in H2o , turned into a nephew. Freddy Kruger was after the children of the town that killed him when he was human. Your movie can be silly, but it has got to have a motive.