In short: Fatal Exam (1990)

It’s nearly the end of the semester for a group of university students. Their parapsychology – and yes, the film actually acknowledges that this isn’t a mainstream field of study – professor has come up with a bit of an adventure for them to end on: investigate a supposedly haunted house over a long weekend. It’s quite the place too, with a nice day of ritual murder in its past and more to come in its future (spoiler?).

Of course, before the murders can eventually start again, there a lot of very slow scenes of actors wandering the least creepy house imaginable, slowly reading from papers, and so on.

Because if writer/director/producer/editor Jack Snyder’s local (in this case Missouri) production is one thing, it is thorough. So expect half of the dialogue to be repeated two or three times in the same emotionless and bored tone the amateur thespians here say – and do – nearly everything in; scenes not to end – ever!; and for half of the dialogue to be repeated two or three times in the same emotionless and bored tone the amateur thespians here say – and do – nearly everything in. Did I mention the repetitions? It’s no wonder the whole things goes on for nearly two hours that feel rather more like eight.

Anyway, from time to time, Fatal Exam does get to the good stuff I hope for from weird little local one-off productions. There is, for example, a pretty incredible scene in which one of the characters encounters a head – actually, “a fucking head” if we want to quote the guy – in a dining table, repeating the same lines of dialogue about it again and again with even less emotional energy than the rest of the cast one has to see to believe. Even better, the character will verbally return to this episode repeatedly later on, until he sees a ghostly apparition with a sword hack up a just as ghostly woman, from which point on, he, until his demise, will talk about that one a lot. It’s all a bit like being trapped in the mind of someone with obsessive compulsive disorder. I am unsure if that’s a selling point or a warning.