Dorm of the Dead |
  • USA • 2006 • 75m •   • Directed by: Donald Farmer. • Starring: Ciara Richards, Adrianna Eder, Jackey Hall, Tiffany Shepis, Andrea Ownbey, Christopher Slade, Amy Owenby, Mike Dusi, Michelle Penick, A.J. Dennis, Jeff Dylan Graham, Tiffany DuFoe, Michael Sonye..    At Arkham University, campus bitches Clare and Julie have a score to settle with goth chicks Sarah and Allison and when Amy accidentally unleashes a campus zombie epidemic, Clare picks Sarah as the perfect candidate to join the walking dead! But things have a way to backfire...
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Review:
The story follows a college student who is forced out of her dorm due to lack of funds. She moves into the low income dorm, which looks like an abandoned tenement. The next day in class, the professor is leading a discussion on cultural views towards death, and mentions that he brought back a vial of zombie blood from Haiti. During the discussion, the main character and her friend laugh at another classmate, the queen bee campus snob Claire. Claire vows revenge and decides to steal the zombie blood and infect the girls. We also find out that the professor was sleeping with a student and tested the zombie blood on her when she threatened to go public with the affair. The zombie girlfriend has been living in the condemned housing unit, along with a few other infected students, hence the title.
Clair ends up getting the vial and infecting the main character. However, unlike the scene in which we saw the professor's mistress get infected (it took ten seconds for her to transform into a zombie), Sarah remains human, but craves raw meat. Eventually, she attacks and eats others, and slowly, by the end has become a full zombie. In the final scene, she is shot and presumably killed while her friend watches in horror (it was shown in an unbroken shot on a live newscast, I guess). As other reviewers have pointed out, one of the obvious distractions of this movie is that characters were filmed at different times with different equipment, then edited together. So you get a shot of Claire delivering a line with plenty of background noise, then a retort from another character with an entirely different audio quality, responding in a cadence that doesn't remotely resemble an actual conversation. I should also mention that the actress playing Claire had to be the most vacant human being you could imagine, both in terms of her delivery, and her facial and physical expressions. Which only made it more watchable, ironically.
Most of these flaws didn't bother me. I found it so inept that it was fascinating to watch, for the most part. There were some stretches that were slow, but for the most part I was pretty entertained (in the unintentionally bad-movie sort of way). Also, there were some songs on the soundtrack that were actually really good, enough so that I wish I could find them to download. I'm not that interested in zombies or gore, so I didn't really care about the shortcomings that most genre fans would complain of. Definitely very, very badly done, but I enjoyed the mess.
Review by jfgibson73 from the Internet Movie Database.
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