FINAL EXAM / RUSH WEEK

Directed by Jimmy Huston / Bob Bralver. 1981 / 1989. United States.

Jimmy Huston’s FINAL EXAM hit the screen during the slasher boom of 1981. It was a formative year with titles like MY BLOODY VALENTINE, HALLOWEEN 2, THE BURNING, and FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 2 all landing in theaters, raking in the dough, and helping to usher in a new golden age of blood pornography (yay) and film censorship (boo). As far as sub-genres go, the slasher film had a fairly long lifespan, not really petering out until the early 1990s. Of course, it would come back with a vengeance in 1996 with the release of SCREAM and flicker in and out of popularity throughout the 2000s. Like its often undead killers, it’s tough to keep the slasher film down.

Bob Bralver’s 1989 effort, RUSH WEEK, came in as the slasher movie was undergoing the first of many deaths. Jason took Manhattan but didn’t quite take the box office, leading Paramount to consider selling the property. Freddy’s latest theatrical adventure underperformed as well. New Line Cinema would put that franchise on ice just two years later. Michael Myers had his revenge, but the audience got the last laugh. Like Jason, Michael would find himself on the auction block with neither franchise landing at a suitable new home. The few other slashers released that year (most notably, INTRUDER, SLEEPAWAY CAMP III, and CUTTING CLASS) fell more into the realm of horror-comedy than blood-soaked thriller. The slasher ran out of steam hard.

Truth be told, I was going to flip a coin to choose one or the other. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it might be interesting to watch these movies back-to-back, a true college slasher double feature, to see how far the slasher film fell from the halcyon days of 1981 to the truly regrettable sludge of 1989. So I did. For the first time in close to two decades, I watched both FINAL EXAM and RUSH WEEK.

FINAL EXAM opens with that old slasher standby, a couple making out in a car in a secluded area near their college. Before they can even get sweaty in the back seat, a completely normal-sized man with no mask on kills them both with a knife. We cut immediately to the college campus on a sunny new day. We meet Final Girl Courtney, resident fratboy asshole Mark, and Radish, a serial killer enthusiast positively creaming his khakis over last night’s double murder. We notice right away that this college campus is damn near empty, even though this is finals week. We’re told that everyone has gone home. It’s weird and makes no sense until you remember that this movie was made for practically no money. You gotta save dough somehow, folks, and if that means less unlikable characters saying less obnoxious lines, well, fuck it, I’m in.

And remember, this movie was made in 1981, so this was back when teachers could openly joke about having the cheaters in the class assassinated by snipers hiding out on nearby rooftops. You could also have a scene in your movie of a fraternity pulling a school shooting prank, all so Mark can get out of his chemistry test. The only cop in this whole town then threatens to arrest the kid who frantically called 911 to report the shooting. That’s right, FINAL EXAM is not a movie filled with likable or relatable characters. It is full of sociopaths, idiots, and detestable assholes. We meet Wildman, Mark’s meathead frat brother, and Gary, a fraternity pledge who has the hots for Courtney’s friend, Janet. There’s also Lisa, Courtney’s gorgeous blonde roommate, who is having an affair with their married chemistry teacher.

Courtney resents Janet a little bit because she’s good-looking and will therefore get a free ride through life. I think Courtney’s problem isn’t that she’s unattractive, but that she’s a total fucking bore. Our Final Girl will spend 70% of this movie sitting in her dorm room doing absolutely nothing. Oh, and did I mention the killer has arrived on campus and is skulking around? Don’t worry about him, though. He won’t actually raise a knife until the 55-minute mark of this 90-minute movie. Awesome.

Gary gives up his class pin to Janet, so the frat guys strip him down to his tighty whiteys and tie him to a tree, slathering him with whipped cream before leaving him there to be killed off-screen. Janet leaves to untie him and gets murdered off-screen, too. You sensing a pattern here? Characters wander off on their own just to die bloodless deaths. And where is our Final Girl in all of this, you ask? She’s playing solitaire in her dorm room. Radish pops by to pretend to sip whiskey. Riveting.

At this point, you start to wonder why the killer even bothered waiting until night to kill people if the school is just as busy at night as it is during the day. There are only a dozen people on campus, and one of them is a teacher. Surely, we could have been watching an interesting movie for the past hour, right? Why did you make us watch asshole frat guys pull pranks while our Final Girl complains about her friends? Couldn’t we have gotten this all over by now? What did I do to deserve this?

Kevin Williamson obviously watched FINAL EXAM at some point in his life. Gary’s playful punishment at the hands of his frat brothers, being tied up and abandoned, is basically the same fate Derek suffered in SCREAM 2. The character of Radish clearly inspired the character of Randy, right down to him being a nerd with a crush on the Final Girl. But Randy’s horror obsession served a purpose in those early SCREAM films. Radish’s weird obsession with serial killers does nothing to move the plot along here. If this film were written well, Radish would have put his exhaustive knowledge of serial killers to good use, cracking the case and helping overcome the killer, but oh well. He just ends up getting killed off-screen like everyone else anyway.

The finale finds Courtney leading our nameless, motiveless killer up a clock tower for a lame showdown, further evidence that Williamson unfortunately had this lame ass film lodge itself in his brain at a young age. In an early draft of HALLOWEEN: H20 that Williamson worked on, Michael pursues Molly up a bell tower, tossing her down to her death. Courtney just beats the killer with a 2x4. Roll credits. Who was the killer? Who knows? We never get a reason why he was killing all these kids. Maybe that’s the point: that this was just a motiveless killing spree. I mean, if the film doesn’t need a premise, why does the killer need a motive?

The killer in RUSH WEEK most definitely has a motive, and you’ll figure it out well before the third act. But first, we open right in the middle of a frat party. There are more college kids in the first two shots of this opening party scene than there are in the entirety of FINAL EXAM. We even get T&A within the first five minutes. This is a party thrown by Beta Delta Beta, a recently reinstated fraternity led by Jeff, a regularly distracted dreamboat haunted by the violent murder of his ex-girlfriend just one year prior.

We meet Julie, played by the lovely Kathleen Kinmont, as she poses nude for Arnold, a college cafeteria worker moonlighting as a private photographer for some unknown perverted benefactor at the school. He hands her some money and leaves, just in time for a robed man in a Halloween mask to start swinging his large, double-edged axe into Julie’s soft flesh... off-screen, of course. RUSH WEEK is, unfortunately, just as bloodless as FINAL EXAM.

A journalism major named Toni latches onto Julie’s disappearance. It could make for one hell of a story. We meet the college dean, Mr. Grail, who has no love for the BDB fraternity or the layabouts, lushes, and bimbos on campus. He feels it is his job to point his students towards the right path and protect them from corruption and danger. After all, it was his daughter who was killed a year ago. Hey, look at that. We’re already setting up possible motives for our killer. Incredible.

Toni eventually crosses paths with Jeff, and the two are immediately horny for one another. Things would be going well if Toni were not receiving messages on her computer telling her to “drop it or else!”. Someone doesn’t want Toni digging into past events. More women go missing, including an escort hired by Jeff’s fraternity to, ahem, entertain the pledges. Byron, Jeff’s closest friend, tells Toni that Jeff has been acting weird lately, going for late-night walks all by himself. He also gets very defensive whenever Toni asks him about, well, pretty much anything. Hmm, we already glimpsed the killer wearing the same robe worn by the BDB boys. And didn’t we see one of the frat guys carrying a double-bladed axe? Could it be that Jeff is behind all of this?

Toni is approached one day by Arnold. He shows off the hundred-dollar bills she could pocket if she posed for him. On the bills is a shape, stamped in red, of a double-edged axe, just like the money she found in Julie’s dorm room earlier that week. With the Dean not believing her story, her editor unwilling to listen to her, and no one to turn to but a potential killer, Toni decides to set up a sting of her own. She calls Arnold and accepts the offer, setting a trap to catch the killer all by herself.

RUSH WEEK feels like an actual movie. People move from location to location. Things are set up and then paid off. Characters have motivations and form relationships with other characters. The killer has a motive, the finale has a pulse, and there are enough red herrings that you feel like you should be paying attention to the movie instead of hoping for it to end. Is it good? Not really. It certainly isn’t free from asshole frat boys who throw obnoxious, homophobic pranks at a competing frat house, and trick a prostitute into almost sleeping with a corpse. Jesus, fellas, that’s how TERROR TRAIN started! You looking to get killed next year or something?

I fully expected at the start of this little experiment to leave the double-feature feeling like I wanted to lop my own head off with a cartoonishly large axe, but really, RUSH WEEK was somehow much more interesting and fun than FINAL EXAM, a slasher movie made at a time when slasher movies were considered good, or at least better than they would ever be again. FINAL EXAM is just a cheap quickie, something made for a few bucks with the goal of cable TV syndication. It has infinitely more in common with those other late 80s garbage slashers like PHANTOM OF THE MALL and HIDE AND GO SHRIEK than it does with its 1981 contemporaries.

I expected FINAL EXAM to be the better movie, but it’s barely even a movie. RUSH WEEK, for all its flaws, moved along at a nice pace, had some likable characters with relatable personalities, and didn’t shy away from being a little weird at times. It still doesn’t rise to the level of something like FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 2, but it’s a hell of a lot better than LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH or PSYCHO COP. It was a staple on USA Up All Night (where I first saw it way back when) for a good reason. It’s lightweight, breezy, and unapologetically cheesy. FINAL EXAM is simply dreadful.

So the choice is clear. Watch FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 2.

Or RUSH WEEK if that’s all you got.