BE KIND, DON'T REWIND.........FLUNKING OUT "FINAL EXAM"

Final Exam (1981)    BQ returns to misbegotten little nuggets like this every so often..........

           ..........can't help it. Sometimes it's fun to reminisce - not about the movie itself (an unwatchable waste of time), but the long gone era that spawned it........

               A tiny scrap of refuse like "Final Exam" could only flourish due to two major upheavals in the pop culture landscape........the rise of teen slasher movies after the surprise success of John Carpenter's original "Halloween" and the subsequent rise of the VCR and all the Mom 'N Pop video rental stores that came with it......... 

               For anyone not around in this era (or if you were around and forgot about it)........critical standards at the video store were lower than Donald Trump's I.Q........we were all still besotted with the idea of taking home an actual movie to watch......uncut, commercial free.

               So it didn't matter if we got our hands on an Academy Award winner....or......"Final Exam", for example.....

               Today's makers of horror films could never get away with something like 'Final Exam'.....an amateur night, slipshod, bargain basement effort populated entirely with community theater
non-actors embarrassing themselves every time they spoke.......

               But viewing it in context of its time, there's sort of a sweet innocence to this motley crew, thinking they could get away with making a slasher movie that wastes 90% of its time on its worthless cardboard characters.........a slasher movie with little blood and a killer who's nothing but a generic, hulking guy with a knife.........(by the film's finale, they give up keeping him in shadows, realizing.....what's the point?)

                In this mercifully quick trip down memory lane, BQ will award 1/2 a star for one single startling sequence that "Final Exam"s writer-director Jimmy Huston couldn't possibly know foretold future horrific events.........a scene in which the pranking, odious frat boys stage a fake terrorist attack on campus, complete with machine guns and make-believe student victims.........

               Maybe that's why today's horror movies can hardly keep up with real life.......