Like any university, Whiton University has its share of frat houses, sororities and dark secrets. The main premise of what, on the surface, appears to be a by-the-numbers slasher, is that an exclamation mark has a murky tradition of being used on social media to potentially shame those that are deemed to be worthy of this ignominy.
When Kylie has no memory of what happened at a frat party, where she may or may not have been sexually assaulted, it puts into motion a chain of events that creates a serial killer on campus who appears to be out for revenge. As the frat house brothers start to turn up dead, a mystery unravels up until a final reel reveal where we find out that the campus has been hushing up instances like this in the past and the killer turns out to be a left-field choice, albeit one that makes total sense once you know all the facts.
What could have been a societal commentary of the misuse of social media and how white males are protected by the faculty in situations like this, actually turns out to be a bit of a mess. It takes thirty minutes for the film to decide that it wants to be a horror film, the preceding twenty-nine playing out more like a drama. Even then, the killer turns up out of nowhere, with no buildup and no tension being offered until the last ten minutes or so.
The exclamation point – which during promotion was used so prominently, especially the trailer – is only used once on screen and mentioned only once or twice more. The pacing is awful, the opening act is slow to get moving, and you never feel any real connection to any of the characters. So when they start to turn up dead, you can’t really seem to care.
Even the mystery of the killer’s identity is botched, with the final reveal only making sense due to flash-backing and giving us extra information that wasn’t made available to the viewer earlier on. Yancy Butler (remember her?) shows up only to look quizzical and surprised for every minute of her screen time. The cinematography is pretty decent but, aligned with a story that looks like it’s been written and directed by those who have seen a couple of ’80s slashers and thought they could easily pull it off, it doesn’t make up for the shortfalls elsewhere within the production.
We’d literally kill for a good old ’80s slasher throwback right now – but this is not that film.
Release Date: May 24th
