Dorm Of The Dead DVD Review
I usually try to start my reviews with a short recap of the events of the movie, but Dorm Of The Dead is such a mish-mash of crap that it’s difficult to do. It starts out with a college girl denying her man sex because boys aren’t allowed in the dorm. When the boy leaves he is approached by a couple of sorority girls that are obviously zombies but somehow this gets past the dude. Maybe it’s because they only have a little bit of green/gray make-up on and a touch of blood, the rest of their scantily clad bodies are a golden tan color. After about 5 minutes of making out, one of them bites him (even in death, sorority girls don’t eat much). Then this ninja zombie shows up and does some flips. Then the girls over take the boy and they drag him off, like zombies do. Then the zombies attack his naked girlfriend. Cut to a 5 minute girl on girl make out scene that’s interrupted by the jealous and violent boyfriend. The ladies flee and the boyfriend follows the girlfriend and threatens to kill her in the parking garage. But, while he’s choking her, a zombie bites him and drags him away, like zombies do. The girlfriend, instead of taking off in the car she was just dragged out of, walks through the parking garage and gets bitten by the boyfriend.
Up until this point, the audio and video work were quite passable for a low-budget horror flick. After this, the quality takes a nose dive. It’s obviously shot on a run-of-the-mill home video camera using only the camera mic for sound. For the next 30 minutes, the quality flip-flops between the low-budget movie stuff and the hand held home video camera stuff, even in the middle of scenes. It actually flips from angle to angle where you can hear the hiss from the home video camera footage while one person is talking, then there’s no hiss while the low budget movie footage is rolling of the person they are supposedly talking to. All the low-budget footage uses 25 to 30 year old actors that don’t act very well, the home video camera footage is all starring high school kids that can’t act for shit. It’s as if someone started a movie in college, then passed it on to their younger sibling to finish up.
So, after the high school kids start being in the movie, it’s about these two girls, Sara and Jill, and their rivalry with some stuck up girl named Clare. Sara and Jill run afoul of Clare by being goth and laughing at her in class while their teacher was doing a presentation on his vial of zombie blood that he got from Haiti. Their teacher made his student mistress a zombie, who started making zombies of quarreling couples in parking garages. Clare steals the zombie blood and pours it into Sara’s mouth while she’s sleeping. After this, Sara has massive meat cravings and a bad complexion.
It’s not just the camera, sound and acting quality that drops, the camera-work, the editing and special effects all go to pot as well, not that they had far to fall.
The zombies a pretty consistent throughout the movie in that they all look like crap. They seriously just put some different color make-up on the center of their faces and add a bit of blood. They don’t bother putting any on their neck or any other obviously exposed skin areas. The rest of the special effects consist of blood, sometimes blood that squirts from off camera.
Luckily, Dorm of the Dead is only 65 minutes long. Unfortunately, they were stretching it with that. There are a lot of lingering shots of the main character walking that seemingly are only there to fill up time to meet the minimum requirements for feature length. At one point she walks through a truck stop and is obviously walking in circles and the camera follows her the whole way until she finally makes it to the fridge with the meat, where theres another drawn out scene of her eating the meat in the same manner forever!
Someone might like that there are boobs in the first half of this movie, at least three pair. But as I have said before for Zombie Lake, you might as well watch some porn if that’s what you’re after, as their quality is on par with the rest of this movie.
A good way to get back at your worst enemy would be to suggest that they watch Dorm Of The Dead and lie about it being worth it once they reach the end. As for me, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend that anyone watch this movie for any reason except to review it and ward off others. Avoid at all costs.
