Final Exam | 1981 | USA | Jimmy Huston

Jimmy Huston’s school-based slasher was released during the genre’s most fruitful period, but only gained a limited theatrical release and skipped the cinemas entirely in the UK. Shy Courtney, rich friend Lisa and murder-obsessed geek Radish are just a few of the students at Lanier College, during a fraught semester of life-changing exams. Among affairs with professors, fraternity initiations and campus shooting pranks, the students soon find themselves the target of a spree killer whose motivation and identity is hauntingly left unclear. Much closer in tone and execution to John Carpenter’s Halloween, the film de-emphasises blood and guts to rely more on tension, atmosphere and characters. This means that the lack of any explicitness or overall mildness of the feature make it very difficult to ascertain why it was flagged as a contentious issue. One can only assume it was because it was merely a slasher film..?