After murdering a couple on another campus, a killer is loose on the campus of Lanier College.
It falls to students Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi) and Radish (Joel S. Rice) to try and stop him.
Final Exam is no hidden masterpiece. But it is a good example of how the slasher genre, even in its initial run of the early eighties, was capable of playing around with its conventions.
The film is not that scary - I will admit to being checked out during the third act - but it contains a few elements which make it stand out.
The primary one is a great character.
Joel S. Rice’s Radish is initially presented as a nerd, a familiar archetype.
As the movie goes on, he is shown to be more fleshed out. While he is a prankster, he does not follow other examples of this character (Alfred from The Burning), and turn out to be a creep, or an annoying prankster. And he supports the final girl from a space of friendship rather than pure sexual desire.
The veteran slasher watcher in me knew he was being set up to die, but this is the rare case where his death has an emotional impact - there is a genuine sense of tragedy when he dies.
That actually goes for all of the deaths.
Like 1989’s Intruder, this film takes over half the runtime for the villain to start stacking bodies.
Because the film bothers to flesh out these characters, even though the scenes are not scary, the characters’ deaths still carry a level of viewer investment.
No comments:
Post a Comment