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To me, this movie is perfection.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

hyped garbage

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The pacing kills what could have been a fun, effective slasher. The film really doesn't get going until the last 10 or 15 minutes. Everything up to that point is essentially filler/padding minus a couple of kill scenes that leave a lot to be desired in terms of special effects.While there's definitely worse slashers from this time Final Exam doesn't do much to separate itself from the pack.

An unknown maniac is prowling a college campus stalking students the day before final exams. All the familiar slasher film characters are here. Courtney (Bagdadi) is the virginal one who becomes the final victim. The jock (Brown), the nerd (Rice), the slut (Deanna Robbins) and the Druggie (Fallon) are all present. Director Jimmy Huston makes a curious decision to show the killer's face several times. Unfortunately he never gets around to telling us, who he is, why he is killing everyone and what his motivation is. I guess in the year of the slasher film 1981, you just needed someone with a large knife killing people to make one of these films. The death scenes range from boring to inventive and there is some suspense present in the end scenes. A decent score helps, but "Final Exam" needed more true scares, better plotting, and perhaps a masked killer to have stood out. This is for die-hard slasher fans only.

"Final Exam" admittedly will likely engender mostly personal reactions; you'll either appreciate what writer / director Jimmy Huston is doing or you won't. His entry in the original slasher movie cycle is more in the "Halloween" mode than the "Friday the 13th" mode, meaning little in the way of nudity and gore, so if those are elements that you crave, you won't receive much to whet your appetite. The story takes place on a college campus where a brutal psychopath (Timothy L. Raynor) starts eliminating the student bodies. However, despite an opening murder set piece (Huston does know that this kind of thing often does need to start with a bang), nobody else gets killed for almost another 50 minutes. The first hour consists mainly of setting up characters and in fact comes off more as campus comedy, with the usual assortment of infantile, obnoxious frat boys, the principal one being the aptly named "Wildman" (Ralph Brown), a man so cool he's put his name on both sides of his shirt. Appealing Cecile Bagdadi is the even keeled lead female, and Joel S. Rice is the memorable "Radish", certainly a prototype for the Randy character in the "Scream" movies if ever there was one, who's meant to be a likable type of nerd, and Rice is engaging in the role, yet the guy does have quite a healthy fascination with true crime and even professes admiration for real life sniper Charles Whitman in class! One of Radish's admonitions is that "people are killed every day for no reason at all", and Raynor's killer is walking proof of this, as his character has no back story, no personality, and nothing in the way of an obvious motivation. While admittedly the movie is rough going for a while, the characters and performances make it palatable enough; other principal cast members include sexy DeAnna Robbins (who provides for us what little nudity there is) and Sherry Willis-Burch as the rather dim Janet. The best stuff is saved for the last 15 minutes or so, as Courtney runs for her life in an almost completely deserted campus. While not among the best of its kind, it's still not as bad as some fans of the genre will assert, although, once again, it may just come down to personal taste. Six out of 10.

"Final Exam" is a prime and stellar example of how horror movies should NOT be done, but unfortunately it was quite common during the early eighties for cheap and nearly unwatchable nonsense like this to find its way to the drive-in's and the VHS players of insatiable horror junkies. Obviously the people responsible for this film were jealous of the enormous success of contemporary slasher movies – in particular the pioneers "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" – and hence they quickly decided to make one of their own. One tiny little problem, however, is that in their rush and dim-witted enthusiasm Jimmy Huston and Co totally overlooked some basic yet highly fundamental elements in their scenario. For example, oh I don't know, a little bit of spreading of the action and perhaps the slightest attempt to provide the killer with a motive?!? I enjoy spotting clichés in slasher movies but this film really exaggerates! "Final Exam" opens with the prototypic murder of a young couple in their convertible on lover's lane. The murder is bloodless and lame, but what the heck… It's still early in the film and you have faith that everything will get a lot bloodier and exciting shortly. But it doesn't. On the contrary, the next full hour is the most boring and irritating hour in the history of imbecilic horror cinema. A gathering of the most stereotypical college students (including the blond bimbo, the vulgar jock, the nice girl and the wannabe frat-kid) remain at their college for a few extra days, supposedly to complete their mid term exams but in fact all they do is nag and run around like headless chickens. Throughout this entire period of retarded fraternity jokes and worthless dialogs, there isn't any sign of a psychopathic killer. Then, all of a sudden and when you actually don't even expect it anymore, a big fella in a green shirt shows up and randomly begins to slaughter everyone who crosses his path. Why? Your guesses are as good as mine. Even at the very end of the film, when everybody just wants to hear out his motivations and get it over with, we still know nothing. At some point in the boring middle section, I think I remember someone mentioning that a few years earlier a female college student died during an initiation rite. My best and only guess would be that the killer is either her dad, brother or boyfriend. Is that correct? Who knows! Are we even supposed to wonder about it? I doubt it. "Final Exam" is a complete and utter failure without any redeeming qualities (apart from a topless DeAnna Robbins) and it's incomprehensible that this film somehow managed to build up a cult following.