I'm kinda torn on this one. On one hand, it's a pretty typical slasher movie minus any memorable setpieces or kills. On the other hand, I respect that they were trying to do something a little bit different with a formula that was already growing tired, even by 1981.
Lanier College is in finals week, and to add to that stress there's a shadowy figure with an Anton Chigurh haircut prowling the campus with a butcher knife and an urge to kill. Eventually. Like most slasher movies, we open with a kill, but then there's about an hour without any bloodshed (outside of a "harmless prank" that if attempted today would easily result in a campus lockdown and a stack of real dead bodies all on its own. My, how times have changed).
The movie is a weird hybrid of frat comedy and slasher movie, and not only does it do a poor job of balancing those things, it's not particularly good at either one. The frat stuff isn't funny, and the slasher stuff isn't scary or suspenseful. There's not even any mystery, the killer is unmasked and (SPOILERS) his identity and/or motive are never discussed. Dude just hates finals and mom jeans, I guess. To be fair, I actually like the choice to make the murders unmotivated, there's sort of a realism in that that ups the creep factor, it just doesn't make for a terribly entertaining movie.
Most of the violence is kept offscreen, and frankly the movie suffers for it. It's not like the audience for these things has an insatiable bloodlust, but we do expect some memorable kills if you're not gonna bother giving us any suspense. I appreciate the choice of the filmmakers to show less onscreen bloodshed, but they don't balance that choice by giving us characters to care about or a mystery to solve, it's just a lot of waiting around for things to get all stabby again.
It's disappointing, but still a far cry from the worst the genre has to offer. I feel like if it had a setpiece toward the middle like the raft sequence from The Burning it would be much more fondly remembered.
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