Final Exam

When a movie is obviously part of a trend, comparisons are inevitable. Sci-fi after Star Wars got compared to that. Every erotic thriller in the 90’s was traced back to Basic Instinct. For slashers, the template is usually Halloween. Friday the 13th proudly wore its inspiration on its sleeve, but it also knew it couldn’t do a beat-for-beat ripoff, like a lazy cover song. It made the setting remote. It removed any semblance of adult protection — there would be no Dr. Loomis to save the Final Girl. A mystery element was added. And the violence was not just hinted at, hurt reveled in. Final Exam also wears its inspiration on its sleeve, but unlike Friday, it makes no attempt at hiding its inspiration. It is a naked, note-for-note cover of Halloween, only done by a garage band that’s downed a couple pitchers of beer per person before sound check. It’s a lazy, perfunctory copy. Where Friday amped it up, Final Exam waters it down. For instance, we get an hour with the characters before the body count begins. Only instead of a small cast and getting to know them, we get a much larger cast, so there can be a bigger body count, but they’re all bland, one note characters. A jock, an alpha male, a horny chick, a nerd, a bookworm. We see them do normal college things, but it all feels like killing time, not getting to know them. The killer is almost completely unseen for the first hour, barely even in stalking shots. There’s no build up of tension. Just a lot of wasted time until we go into the third act and EVERYBODY MUST DIE. It’s boring and tiresome. And speaking of the killings, again, they miss what made Halloween good. Those murders felt like MURDERS. We saw the stalking, the attack, the fear, and then the death. Half the kills here are off screen, and when we do see them, they’re so sudden as to barely register at all. Halloween drew out the kills and made them intrusive, personal, and miserable. Friday gave you inventiveness and carnage. Final Exam does neither; it either doesn’t want to show you anything at all, or it does but it wants to get it over with as quickly as possible. And then there’s the killer himself, the faceless agent of death taken to the most extreme example. Jason and Michael and their ilk may lack personality, but they do have characteristics and motivations behind those gleaming white masks. This killer has none. Literally, he is given no backstory, no motivation, and not even a name. He just shows up and starts killing people. That may be more like real life — your Ted Bundys and Green River Killers don’t announce themselves — but this is a movie. There needs to be more of a hook. Jason is out for revenge for his mom. Michael has several different motivations, depending on the timeline. This is just some bowl-cut-wearing guy in jeans and a jacket, killing people because the script says so. There is no tension, no suspense, no interesting story arcs or character development, no gore, and no catharsis at the end. This is as rote a slasher as you could possibly get, literally copying a movie’s formula and just transplanting the location, not changing anything at all. How John Carpenter didn’t file a plagiarism lawsuit is beyond me.