Directed by Jimmy Huston
Written by Jimmy Huston
Starring:
- Cecile Bagdadi as Courtney
- Joel S. Rice as Radish
- Ralph Brown as Wildman
- DeAnna Robbins as Lisa
- Sherry Willis-Burch as Janet
Release Date: February 27, 1981
Rating: 
Among fans of blood-spattered campus killings, there’s this ongoing argument about Jimmy Huston’s Final Exam. The accepted wisdom—or let’s be honest, the lazy final verdict—is that the film isn’t just a dull leftover from the genre’s busiest heyday, but the dullest slasher ever churned out. I usually fall in with the crowd that digs the brainless exploitation logic pulsing through American slashers, but here I’ve got to break ranks. The whole “boredom” accusation is a flimsy, fallacious cop-out that fans use to write this movie off without thinking. On a technical level, I don’t find it boring; sure, it drags and it wastes time, but it’s nowhere near the coma-inducing reputation it’s been saddled with. The actual issue isn’t the mechanics—honestly, it functions just fine as a cheesy, haphazard knockoff of stronger slashers. The real problem is the dead-on-arrival dialogue, every character talking with this weird, disingenuous flatness. That lifeless vibe is what makes the whole thing feel so damn tedious.
As horror cinema, this thing is a full-blown fiasco—I doubt anyone would fight me on that—but when you look at it strictly as a slasher, it’s just another throwaway in a subgenre already drowning in trash. Jimmy Huston’s script wants desperately to be the most literal Halloween knock-off in existence. Not in story terms—Final Exam doesn’t clone Carpenter’s babysitter-turned-final-girl narrative—but in the way it tries to cannibalize the film’s formal tricks. You get the drifting tracking shots, the motive-free shadow stalker, the killer’s POV creeping past in a car, the bare-bones architecture of the murders, and that endlessly looping eerie score. In terms of form, Final Exam clings to a fake-Halloween aesthetic with surprising loyalty. It doesn’t make the film any better, but at least it exposes what the movie wants to become. Both its plotting and its form fall apart while retelling a warmed-over story in this sloppy slasher attempt, but the arty, unpolished style does grant a strange worth to its familiar template. The real problem begging for a proper lashing is the content—because, honestly, these might be some of the most insufferable characters the slasher world has ever coughed up.
Final Exam’s plotless setup revolves around a parade of cardboard stereotypes—the virginal good girl, the horny blonde, the twitchy nerd, and a gaggle of braindead frat boys—roaming a college campus stalked by a cold, nameless killer who just sort of drifts through the scenery. And that’s basically all this anemic slasher framework has to offer. Still, something strangely perverse happens in that monotony: Jimmy Huston makes the “brilliant” creative decision—heavy sarcasm here—to stash every single kill until the closing minutes. In the hands of a director with actual chops, that could’ve played like a clever tension bomb finally going off in a bloody grand finale; but this is Jimmy Huston we’re talking about, so the whole thing backfires. Yet I don’t think it’s quite the abomination people say it is. After all, Paul Lynch’s Prom Night—released a year earlier—pulled the exact same stunt, and nobody seems to roast Lynch for it. Yes, Prom Night flaunts Jamie Lee Curtis and rare glimpses of Leslie Nielsen, but even their presence can’t rescue that disaster. And while Final Exam copies the mistake, at least there’s a grim, ironic joy in watching its insufferable characters finally meet violent ends.
What truly piqued my interest in this deranged structural gambit was the film’s bizarre tonal swerve across the narrative. Early on, Final Exam serves up nothing but relentless bullying of defenseless students—pure fluff, all schlock, no pulse. Then, when the finale finally arrives, the movie suddenly remembers it’s supposed to be a slasher and just… becomes one. No twist, no rationale, no thematic payoff—just a dude killing college kids because that’s what the genre demands. Part of me wonders if Jimmy Huston was trolling the entire audience, or if the film is his cracked, deadpan retort to Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders, a movie that famously dumps all its murders in the first act with zero explanation. Final Exam does the exact opposite and saves every drop of brutality for the last reel. And if you look closely, you’ll spot a Toolbox Murders poster hanging in one of the dorm rooms—maybe a hint, maybe a joke, maybe nothing at all. But that little detail is what ignited this whole theory in my head.
