Jun 9, 2024
Final Exam (1981)
"Why are you so apprehensive? When are you going to realise that the whole world isn't made of psychopaths skulking about?"
"But they are out there. They do exist. People are killed every day for no reason at all. Perfect strangers wake up in the morning and decide, 'Hmm, I think it's a good day to snuff somebody". And these are people who eat at our restaurants with us, use our highways and vote for the President, which probably explains something about him, too. I'm not paranoid. I'm just facing unhappy facts."
#final exam#1981#slasher film#video nasty#blood tw#knife tw#american cinema#jimmy huston#cecile bagdadi#joel s. rice#ralph brown#deanna robbins#sherry willis burch#john fallon#terry w. farren#timothy l. raynor#sam kilman#don hepner#mary ellen withers#carol capka#gary s. scott#unexpectedly slow burn for a golden age slasher; invests an inordinate amount of time into developing its characters which is something i#usually really appreciate in my horrorā but the script and some of the performances can't always prop up that glacial pacing#also unusual in having a killer who is resolutely just Some Guy: no othery semi paranormal big bad hereā no layered and tragic figure#with a rich backstory and a ready made lore. he's just a dude (with a bowl cut) who kills people for reasons that are never explicitly#stated. which is interesting! but a lot of this is by the numbers slasheringā and at that it doesn't exactly stand out from the crowd#there is a nerd character called Radish who's very interesting tho (or rather how the film treats him and what it does with him is#interesting and quite unlike other contemporaneous nerd characters in slasher cinema). by no means a bad entry in the canon#but neither is it a particularly notable one and it would probably have been forgotten entirely if it hadn't ended up on the dpp list#there are better slashers in academic settings: Prom Night and Slaughter High tread this route more entertainingly
