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Dorm of the Dead (2012)

Studio: Midnight Releasing/Brain Damage Films
DVD Release: February 7, 2012
Not Rated


Review by James Klein

Eyeball ripped out. Penis split in two. Being force fed diarrhea from a homeless man. Sodomy by a baseball bat. No, these aren't gruesome scenes from Midnight Releasing's Dorm of the Dead. However, these are things I would rather have done to me than to ever sit through this piece of shit ever again. With more and more people buying video cameras, every teen or 20-something thinks he/she is the next Bergman/Allen/Scorsese/Romero. It seems like the DVD market is being flooded with these super cheap, home made "movies" that are not only a waste of time but down right irritating to sit through.

The plot is obviously simplistic: a young man in college named Will thinks he's super cool by cutting class, talking like a street bum, and wearing sun glasses. When his younger brother Cory comes to visit him, Will is not happy and now has to babysit his brother when all he wants to do is party. After some students come back from a booze cruise, they seem to have caught some sort of flu that is turning them into zombies. Suddenly, in hilariously bad CGI fashion, the campus is on fire and the school is overrun by teens and 20 something's in gray make up and vampire blood that you can buy at Walgreens during Halloween season dribbling down their chins. When the overacting college kids split up into two groups, one can only predict the outcome. But seriously, by the time this happens, who cares?

I am all for low budget film making and really am a supporter of it. What I DON'T support are these college age kids who think they can be a film maker that don't even try to bring out good performances or find a decent editor or sound effects artist or even try something original with their story. I can just hear these dorks say, "Dude, lets make a zombie movie, bro!" I don't know about you folks but I have had it with zombie films. Even the grandfather of zombie movies, George Romero, can't make a decent zombie film anymore. The genre is dried up so please, to all you wannabe film makers whose favorite movie is Dawn of the Dead and Evil Dead II...stop! Seriously...no more. Let it rest. Do you see how stupid vampire films are now? This is what you are doing to the zombie genre.

Let's start with Dorm of the Dead's atrocious acting. It's obvious that these kids are about to laugh even during their dramatic moments. I wanted to punch every actor in the nose whenever he/she opened their mouth. The editing is down right terrible. It's as if it was edited thru the camera itself with the actors standing their motionless for a few seconds and then start to "act" as if the director just called, "Action." The film maker's couldn't even get the sound ambiance right with noise drops/changes taking place during every cut. Lets not forget the terrible special effects or just no special effects at all. My favorite part is when a character vomits in a toilet and pulls his head back to reveal...nothing.

I feel forced to say something good about this movie so I guess the location works as the college campus does look large with plenty of different settings. (pause) I have now sat at my computer for five minutes trying to come up with something else good to say. I can't do it. Dorm of the Dead is fucking terrible. Class dismissed.

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