Movies
Final Exam
“[Final Exam] focuses so much on who the cliché bunch of kids are that it becomes a bloated, unfunny coming-of-age college comedy with a slasher subplot crammed in to capitalize on the genre’s appeal.”
Spoilers
In a time when countless Friday The 13th and Halloween clones were dominating the horror marketplace, Final Exam stands out as a very different kind of slasher. Instead of pumping the film full of gratuitous violence (it really doesn’t have any) and nudity (pretty sparse), the producers decided to tone down the violence and focus on giving the characters some weight. It sounds like a godsend on paper – a slasher film with some character development! – but it focuses so much on who the cliché bunch of kids are that it becomes a bloated, unfunny coming-of-age college comedy with a slasher subplot crammed in to capitalize on the genre’s appeal.
After an opening where a canoodling couple is killed in their parked car, the action switches to Lanier College during final exam week. The nerd is busy studying his heart out, the jocks are carrying out really elaborate schemes to cheat, and students are sleeping with teachers to pass; in other words, pretty standard stuff. Except, in a slasher film, someone should be dying, and Final Exam doesn’t kill off anyone else until almost an hour in. The characters are dealing with reasonably plausible scenarios and they do have distinctively different personalities from one another, but they’re still stock characters dealing with situations that are better handled in other films.
The one notable exception is the campus fraternity faking a school shooting to distract some teachers from paying attention to their students so they could cheat. It’s pretty hilarious how intense their diversion is, throwing the campus into a panic and getting the sheriff to come out, but even in a pre-Columbine era, it was a really brave stunt to pull in the film, let alone one that ultimately provides the asshole jocks that pulled it off without any consequences – well, they do eventually get killed, but the sheriff lets them off the hook for their stunt, which is RIDICULOUS.
The biggest disappointment in Final Exam is that the killer – who resembles Richard Kiel, albeit a bit smaller – has no motive and seems to strike randomly, which is creepy in a way, but they show his face during the first kill, which is counterproductive to building up any mystery or suspense. You never question who among those left on the campus it is – whether it be male or female, student or faculty – and it makes the second act, which could have been used for this very reason, even more of a slog to sit through. Even if he had a small backstory or a name, like Michael Myers, it could’ve worked; instead, Radish (Joel S. Rice), the resident nerd, keeps bringing up that people are randomly and brutally killed every day, and that’s supposed to be enough.
Final Exam tries to be different and fails miserably, proving that going out on a limb doesn’t always work. The very basis of the slasher genre is built upon exploitable elements, and writer/director Jimmy Huston doesn’t seem to have the slightest grasp of that; if Final Exam didn’t use the familiar archetypes and plot points, it would be hard to even classify it as such. Character development is more than welcome in a subgenre where it’s sorely lacking, but it should make things interesting rather than becoming a crutch for a snoozer of a film.
Special Features
Commentary – Katarina Leigh Waters, a former WWE diva, moderates the track featuring producer Myron Meisel. It’s a pretty lively chat about the film, which is at its most interesting when Meisel is discussing how sloppy and haphazardly the film was conceived and thrown together. They actually did the opposite of what studios are doing today by throwing in a topless scene to guarantee an R-rating, even though the violence is almost non-existent (Meisel says the film originally got an X because the MPAA likes to bully low-budget distributors, which is true).
Interviews With The Stars (14:36) – A collection of individual interviews with Cecile Bagdadi (Courtney), Joel S. Rice (Radish), and Sherry Willis-Burch (Janet). The questions aren’t particularly insightful, but it doesn’t help that the film itself isn’t exactly riveting and deep, so I can’t really say I blame the interviewer.
There’s also an option to watch the film in the “Katarina’s Nightmare Theater” format, which is just an introduction by Waters.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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