Inexchange begins by giving us the shots establishing campus life -- the tree-and-banner lined streets, the arty parks, and ... those long, somewhat foreboding institutional hallways. The scenes are composed with such a distant, cold, yet artful eye that you figure it's a safe bet that writer/producer/director Zach Parker is a big fan of Stanley Kubrick. (Well, that coupled with the comparison to The Shining in the back cover synopsis.)

And like Stanley Kubrick, Parker seems to have a really bleak view of human nature. Maury, the film's protagonist, is obviously disturbed from the get-go. His roommate Joey is everyone's worst nightmare of a "fraternity boy" (except for the fact that he lives in a dorm). Joey's friends are even worse.

Maury could be a nice guy -- he copies the notes from the day's lecture for his heel of a roommate, who repays his gesture by throwing Maury out of the room so he can have "private time" with his girlfriend, Michelle. Unfortunately, Sean Blodgett plays Maury in so much of a socially-oblivious haze that I wanted to beat the guy up myself. And I was a dork in college myself! (Actually, that hasn't really changed with time ...)

But maybe Maury is in a haze because he's always having these visions -- he sees flashes of gore both under stress (as when one of Joey's lunkhead buddies pushes him around in the beginning of the film) and when he's dreaming (during the scene in which Maury has to sleep outside the dorm room so Joey can do the nasty with Michelle). I mean, if I saw flashes of violent death and Sinister Blindfolded Fellows (tm) I'd probably be a little distracted myself.

And yet another possibility is that Maury has his head up his ass because he has a crush on Michelle and isn't sure what to do about it. Either way, Maury should have known better than to accept the party invitation that Joey basically bullies him into accepting.

Apparently, the whole point of this party is so Joey and his chums can get wasted, get Maury even more wasted, and then humiliate him by tying him to a chair so Joey and his buds can piss all over him. And since they were drinking a lot of booze, they have a lot of piss to unload on poor Maury. They piss. And piss. And then piss some more. (You may have seen I Spit on Your Grave? This is I Piss In Your Face.)

But this is apparently a good move for Maury's love life since Michelle is upset enough by all this to dump Joey and move in on Maury. (Isn't if funny what I guy has to do these days to get a gal to notice?)

But it's not enough to quell Maury's desire for revenge, and he strikes a bargain with the Sinister Blindfolded Fellow he keeps seeing in his weird "visions" that ensures that those who crossed Maury will pay. But who is this Sinister Blindfolded Fellow? Well, if you've seen more than a half-dozen horror movies you can figure it out pretty quickly and once you do, you might just groan to yourself a little.

And that's when the film goes off the rails and never comes back. Because Maury is too disturbed from the get go, he can't really be a good point of view character. Because Joey and his pals are such creeps, you can't empathize with them either, and it becomes like a 'Jason' movie, in which we sit around waiting for the deranged guy to kill the unpleasant characters. It even follows the slasher movie rule of killing a couple off immediately after intercourse.

But it doesn't really have the slasher film payoffs either -- there are no memorable deaths like you get in a good giallo. What you get are weak imitations of those scenes.

All in all, this is a missed opportunity. It could have been an interesting character study, it could have been a fun, dark little haunted house/thrill ride movie, it could have been a chilling look at the ravages of mental illness ... but it cops out on really going balls-out on any of these paths and ends up being a well-shot, competently made bit of mediocrity. And it's disappointing, because I started out feeling that the filmmakers were aiming a little higher than that.