Dorm of the Dead: Zombie Girls Gone Wild But I Still Don't Care
You would think that a low-budget zombie flick with "hot college girls" and Haitian voodoo would be an automatic winner, right? OK, maybe not. But you'd think that it would be funny, right? Well, maybe not. Still, you'd think that a fan of brainless horror movies like me would find something in such a flick to latch onto, right? Well, definitely not.
Here's the plot of Dorm of the Dead such as it is. A professor teaching a class that has something to do with death at an apparently all-female university has brought back some blood taken from a gen-yoo-ine Haitian flesh-eating zombie which he then shows off in class. A snooty girl who doesn't like a goth girl decides that it would be a fun prank if she dripped some of this blood into the mouth of the goth girl while she slept which, it goes without saying, turns the goth girl into a goth zombie (more or less; unlike all the other zombies in the flick, she can still express herself, though we never find out why). The professor has already used the zombie blood to get rid of another girl with whom he was having an affair by turning her into a zombie, since keeping a walking corpse around is far less likely to arouse suspicions than just getting rid of the student entirely. She's already gotten out and bitten a couple of other students, turning them into zombies. Then some stuff happens, and eventually the movie ends.
Ta-dah.
I don't expect much from low-budget flicks like this one. In fact, I watch them to help shut my brain off. Still, there's got to be some internal consistency or else my cinematic drug-of-choice for the evening doesn't work. So when the same zombie exhibits superhuman strength in one scene and in the very next can barely lift a body off the floor with the help of three other zombies, I say, "Hmmmm. That's pretty bad." When a character is seen using a cell phone in one scene but a few minutes later has to find a pay phone to call her friend and tell her that she's turning into a zombie, that's pretty bad, too. There are a lot of inconsistencies like that in Dorm of the Dead.
Still, that's not the biggest problem. The acting that comes across as if the actors are reading the lines off a cue card for the very first time is a bigger problem, and it happens a lot. There are many moments when a character is clearly supposed to be having an emotional reaction of pure terror but delivers a deadpan line — "Oh the zombies are coming what should I do now?" — that kill any hope of getting involved with the flick. There are also a number of scenes that look like they were shot on different days and then cobbled together in editing. In these, the lighting doesn't come close to matching and in a couple of instances it looks like one character was shot on film stock and the other on video in what ended up as the same scene. There are moments when the viewer must try to remember that two characters are supposed to be in the same room having a conversation because it doesn't look like they are, and they probably weren't. In other shots, somebody gets chewed on by zombies but doesn't bleed... until the next cut, when suddenly they're soaked in fake-looking blood and have all sorts of wounds that simply pop into existence. Again, such scenes look like they were pieced together and often objects in the same shot have moved around between takes.
Of course, bad acting and editing can sometimes be overcome with a good sense of humor. Dorm of the Dead doesn't have that either, and more's the pity. A flick called Dorm of the Dead has to be humorous somewhere along the line simply because of the title. There are a few attempts at humor sprinkled throughout the flick, but they fall flat every time.
The only good thing in this flick is that part of the soundtrack is performed by a band that does a very good job of sounding just like Rob Zombie. That's the high point of this whole mess, and even that isn't anything original. That's the last problem with Dorm of the Dead; there's nothing new here at all. We've seen it all before and done much better at that.
I'm not sure who the target is for this flick. I don't think most zombie horror fans would go for it for reasons I've already outlined. There isn't anything here that's likely to spook anyone past age 12, a big problem since the movie is rated R. I suppose a few drunken frat boy types might get off on the occasional simulated lesbian sex scenes, but those have become fairly standard fare in any low-budget zombie flick, too. It's not funny enough (i.e., at all) to appeal to horror-comedy fans. I don't get what there is to hook onto in this formulaic and generally lame zombie-chick exploitation flick. I can only surmise in the end that the target audience is the same crowd that buys Girls Gone Wild DVDs... and Howard Stern, who apparently boosted this movie because stripper and "Stern Girl" Andrea Owneby appears in it. With a voice like hers, though, why would that be a good thing?
If Dorm of the Dead were a student, I'd give it an F- and send a note home to its parents.
