Fatal Exam

Director - Jack Snyder (Fatal Call, Ghost Image)

Starring - Mike Coleman (Fatal Examination), Terry Comer (Fatal Examination), and Carol Carlberg-Snyder (Fatal Examination)

Release Date - 1990

Genre - Horror

Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) 

Rating (out of 5):

     When Vinegar Syndrome announced the release of their new box set Home Grown Horrors I was extremely excited about it.  Their Forgotten Gialli box sets are absolutely fantastic and one of my favorite pieces in my collection so I was extremely excited to check out some not so memorable regional horrors.  I was really excited to finally see Winterbeast and check out an 80s horror film I had never seen before.  I was also pumped for Fatal Exam which I thought was a standard slasher flick.  Holy fucking walrus pussy was I wrong.

     The film follows a group of college students who are on a class trip for the weekend to the home of a man who killed his entire family.  The group intends on doing a paranormal investigation and quickly discover that not only is the spirit of the deranged man still roaming the halls of the house but a cult is using an ancient amulet that he had.

     Fatal Exam may not be my favorite film in the set or the one that I was the most excited to see but it is still a solid entry in the set.   This one was filmed in 1985 but was unable to find the funds to be released until 1990.  I was unaware of this until I was putting my review together but if I would have knew that ahead of time I would have been just as excited for this one as I was for Beyond Dream's Door.  Regardless, its another fun film in the set.  The acting in this one is questionable at times and funny at others.  The film has a lot of unintentionally funny scenes that I was not expecting.  I was laughing more than I was expecting and the humor comes from the cast's reactions to certain terrifying scenarios.  They really do try to get into their roles but their inexperience shows.  The story for this one is fucking wild.  You have a lot going on but the movie is just too long.  I love movies centered around cults so I was very much pulled into this one.  However, at almost two hours long I found the film was overstaying their welcome.  We get a lot of smaller scenes that do very little to the story that could have been cut out to make the film flow better.  I loved the mash up of supernatural and occult and the story goes to great lengths to give us a great back story regardless of how cheesy it is.  Finally, the film is not a bloody one.  We do get a few gags that rely on camera tricks and some practical effects but nothing that really stands out which is a shame.  If this one would have followed the story a little closer and showed a few deaths it would have been a lot more enjoyable.  Overall, Fatal Exam is a long one but it has some cheese and a charmingly 80s story that I really enjoyed.  It is rough around the edges but that's to be expected from a film of this caliber.  It fits nicely into this Home Grown Horrors set from Vinegar Syndrome.