Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jon Abrahams
Starring: Jordan Ver Hoeve, Makenzie Vega, Andrew Matthew Welch, Colin Bates, Will Peltz, Leah Pipes
Take the whodunit structure of post-Scream '90s slashers,
the sleaze of '80s slashers, add in some very modern gender-fluid Gen-Z
characters and you have director Jon Abrahams'
Exploited. Abrahams' thriller might be the most bonkers campus slasher since the
immortal 1982 trash classic
Pieces. It's just as seedy, and just as dumb. And yes, it's undeniably
fun.
The movie sets its stall out early with a sequence heavy on full
frontal nudity as a male college student, Caleb (Colin Bates),
appears to be murdered by an assailant in a gimp costume while
performing for an older blonde lady on a webcam show. At the start of
the next school year freshman Brian (Jordan Ver Hoeve) arrives at
the very same college and finds a USB stick in the dorm room he shares
with closeted jock Jeremy (Andrew Matthew Welch). Snooping on the
stick, he discovers multiple recordings of Caleb's webcam performances,
along with the video that seems to show his murder. Rather than alerting
the authorities, Brian contacts his drug dealing older brother Jacob (Will Peltz), who is seemingly something of a computer whiz. As they uncover more
secrets, they attract the unwanted attention of the gimp costumed baddy,
putting their friends and themselves in danger.
I can't say I've ever cared all that much for whodunits. Or rather, I
don’t care for narratives that ask the audience to play a guessing game.
That's not to say I don’t enjoy whodunits. I love
Murder She Wrote, for example, but the draw isn't figuring out who done it, but rather
spending a cosy 48 minutes in the company of Jessica Fletcher and
various eccentric characters. Conversely, I love the Italian giallo
sub-genre, not for its whodunit plotlines (very few of which make any
logical sense if you investigate them too closely), but for the stylish
set-pieces, funky music, outrageous fashions, beautiful women etc. The
thing about the whodunit is that nine times out of 10 it's the person
you least expect who turns out to be the killer. With this in mind
you'll probably figure out the identity of Exploited's masked maniac early on, despite the various clunky red herrings laid
in your path.
Oddly for a slasher movie, there's isn't a whole lot of slashing in
Exploited. Nobody is explicitly killed on screen until the climax, which might
explain why there appears to be no security guards at this college.
There doesn't appear to be any adults around at all, save for a
suspiciously sexy physics lecturer (Leah Pipes) who spends most
of her class boasting about how many books she's sold. Yet despite any
real gore, Exploited still manages to feel nasty and
downright icky in parts. This is largely due to the seediness it evokes
with its various subplots about closeted jocks and slutty sorority
queens. In this age of chaste American cinema, it really feels like a
throwback, though its egalitarian approach to male and female nudity is
decidedly modern.
It doesn't really work as either a slasher or a whodunit, but there is
fun to be had with Exploited if you approach it in the
right frame of mind (ie very drunk or very stoned). Much of the
unintentional humour comes from how shoddy the writing is, particularly
a scene where a victim of a horrific crime opens up about what they've
been subjected to – what should be an uncomfortable moment comes off as
remarkably distasteful and, well, exploitative. The acting is all over
the shop – some of the young performers are as lifelike as a scarecrow
while others deliver performances pitched to 11, but they're all
sufficient for this sort of b-movie nonetheless. On a technical level
it's no worse than any of its bigger budgeted teen horror cousins.
Abrahams is an actor best known for his role in Scary Movie, which makes you wonder if he's in on the joke here.
