End of Term

A horror film about art created by experiencing torture has high ambition. Unfortunately, the end result falls far short. This film cries out to be extreme horror, but instead, the camera constantly shies away from showing anything too terrible. It's by far not the worst movie I've seen, but it begs for the kind of treatment you see in, say, Baskin, or French extreme cinema like Martyrs. Instead, the camera constantly looks away, as if unwilling to engage with the core concept long enough to let the viewer make up their mind. I'd like to see what someone like Clive Barker could have done with the concept; there's a gem of an interesting idea here, but the execution just isn't good enough.

The aesthetics of this film are not great for a flick ostensibly about artists. Everything is quite manufactured and middle brow, nothing screamed talent to me - perhaps the idea was to make fun of people who major in art who end up peaking senior year, never to be heard from again. End of Term is not "atmospheric," I felt that they couldn't even get the setting right. The artist-turned-serial-killer's house looked about twenty years old and nothing special; and the students had terrible taste in decor for such "creative" minds.

Otherwise it looks and feels like a slow moving cop show filmed by BBC TV. It has that Channel 4/PBS sheen. I only kept watching for the mystery factor, at least they managed to drag out the particulars of the plot to keep the audience guessing. But it wasn't an especially fun ride. Forgettable, not recommended, but I've seen worse.