Dorm of the Dead (2006)

The Worst Film Ever

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Here's a horror movie that was made in such a way that the term "low-budget" would not give you the idea. It looks like it was literally made with stuff they had around the house. If you had to put a price tag on your own home movies, that's probably comparable to what it took to make this.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.

"Dorm of the Dead" is a perfectly decent if flawed zombie effort.**SPOILERS**At Arkham Hall College, students Sarah Hannigan, (Ciara Richards) and Allison, (Adrianna Eder) run into trouble with finances for the college, forcing her into a special dorm on school grounds for financially-challenged students. Immediately getting under the skin of Clare, (Jackey Hall) and her friend Julie, (Andrea Ownbey) they conspire to get even against the two. When they learn that a professor on campus has gotten a hold of a special formula that creates zombies, they see it as the perfect way to get back at them and decide to steal it for themselves. Getting the formula, they use it to get back at them but it eventually gets out-of-hand, creating a horde of zombies across the campus and forcing them to fend off their advances and craving for human flesh before they succumb to the virus as well.The Good News: This one wasn't that bad when it tried. The fact that it's so short is one of the better reasons for this one being so good. The fact that this one barely tops an hour manages to make it fly by without too much difficulty, making it not too taxing at all, and while not everything makes sense, the fact that there's always something going on is a good move, keeping it from being boring. There's plenty of attacks in here, and some of them aren't that bad. The confrontation in the parking garage is nice, with the human squabbles taking center-place, then the zombies arrive in the distance and take over, leading to some pretty entertaining scenes. The opening is also rather enjoyable, with the supposed antics coming to a halt when its revealed too late that it's not the scenario hoped for and becoming instead a rather bloody zombie attack. There's more good stuff to come from a later scene of the zombies attacking in a basement complex as well as the individual attacks spread throughout it which are rather fun. It even manages to have some really decent amount of nudity on display, which come from a couple of really interesting scenes. The opening lesbian sequence is quite erotic and really enjoyable, as it's a little bit longer than expected. The flashback sex scene is even better, and it's a rather lengthy scene as well which makes it even more packed with nudity. The last good plus is the rather cheap-looking gore, even though there's a lot of it. There's tons of bites, including stuff to the arms, shoulders, face and neck, a head ripped off, some limbs removed and even an eye eaten out and various scenes of flesh-consumption included amongst it all. These here are what make the film enjoyable.The Bad News: There was a couple flaws to this one. One of the biggest is that the zombies here are very problematic. The main thing is that these look nothing like zombies, rather people with make-up on their face to make them look decomposed, but it looks rather cheap and not all that realistic, which takes a lot of out of their scariness. This one also manages to really rewrite a couple rules about the zombie behavior as well that might irk some, namely the scenes of the zombies interacting with the humans. By first showing signs of understanding English, including following directions given to them, as well as halting their advances enough for a flashback, as well as being able to engage in conversation as well are quite hard to get a hold on for the more hardcore zombie fanatics. Also quite hard to believe are a couple of other scenes where the creatures are seen moving kills somewhere else, despite their still being ample amounts of flesh still there. Usually they're taken down and devoured, but this one has them move the kill around without finishing their work, which is a compete change-of-pace from what's to be expected from these creatures. Combined with the weak look and these behavior issues, they come off as really weak overall, and then because there's so little screen-time devoted to them that they become even less threatening. That's another rather big problem, this has so little time to devote to the zombies, due to the overall length of the film and since it has to flesh out it's back-stories that it leaves very little actual time with the creatures. A lot of the scenes last way too long for what they should've been, including the flashback to the infidelity, the opening fight amongst the characters not even in the rest of the movie and the zombie's quest around town. These should've been trimmed or removed and left more time for the zombie action. The last flaw is the low-budget that's expressed through the zombie make-up and gore, which is quite obvious. These here are the film's problems.The Final Verdict: With about an even mix of flaws and good points, this one pretty much evens out and really doesn't do much either way. Give this one a shot if you're into the cheap, low-budget zombie films or need a quick, harmless nudity-fix, otherwise more discerning zombie-fans should look elsewhere.Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Nudity and several sex scenes

After a Criswell-like introduction (featuring "Dukey Flyswatter"/Michael D. Sonye, a vet of several notable 80s B movies), the action cuts to Arkham Hall Girls' Dormitory, where some strange things are afoot. A sorority girl and her boyfriend are both killed by zombies; one of whom does a back flip for no apparent reason. Tiffany Shepis then puts in a cameo and manages to make it through a long lesbian scene without losing any of her clothing. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. She and her abusive boyfriend, as well as her friend Jane (Amanda Barnett), are killed by more zombies in a parking garage. After wasting about 15 minutes on basically nothing, the film finally gets to the meat of the story. Two best friends, the more straight-laced "geek" Allison Gellar (Adrianna Eder) and goth vegetarian Sarah Hannigan (Ciara Richards) want to do "something cool" so they go visit a cemetery to do some charcoal tracings of tombstones. Afterward, they encounter Southern fried campus bitch queen Clare Ryan (Jackie Hall), who looks and sounds like a less-talented version of Tara Reid. Yes, that IS possible. All three girls attend science class, where their hunky professor Dr. Xander (ugh, kill it with the "Buffy" references already...) talks about death and claims he has a vial of zombie blood he acquired on a trip to Haiti two years earlier. Clare observes in her monotone voice "Someone's been watching too many crappy movies." Tell me about it, sister. Double billing this flick with POT ZOMBIES tonight has almost turned ME into a zombie.Well, Sarah is called to the financial aid office and is told her tuition check has bounced and she has three days to come up with 4 thousand dollars. She's kicked out of her dorm room and forced to go to dreaded Arkham Hall, a run-down building used for "charity case students" who have no money. Arkham is also the hot spot for zombie activity since Dr. Xander (Christopher Slade) had already used his blood sample to turn a female student who tried to blackmail him into a zombie. Since then, things have spiraled out of control and the zombie girl has infected several other students (including Ms. Shepis) who lurk around in the house.Meanwhile, Clare coerces her bimbo friend Julie (Andrea Brooke Owneby, who apparently is "America's Dumbest Stripper" after her IQ score came back near the mental retardation bracket during her appearance on The Howard Stern Show) into helping her break into Dr. Xander's lab to steal his zombie blood. Julie wusses out (and promptly disappears from the rest of the film despite her star billing on the DVD cover), but Clare gets the vial after the doc is killed by zombies. Being the nice girl she is, Clare goes to Arkham Hall and dribbles some of the blood into Sarah's mouth while she's sleeping. That next morning, Sarah awakens in a daze and soon she's feasting on rare meat before graduating to human flesh. It's at this point, nearly an hour into the film, that the films gets slightly better for about ten minutes as Sarah goes on a mild rampage around town. She chews on a dummy head that's supposed to look like Kimberly Lynn Cole and kills the dean's wife. She also hitches a ride from a guy (played by Jim O'Rear) who takes her to a drive-in playing SEE NO EVIL and SILENT HILL. Poor girl. Then it's off to a bar to get back at a drunken Clare, and then to a carnival. There are a few OK metal songs that sounds a lot like White Zombie that play during her feeding frenzies.Director Donald Farmer is a name somewhat familiar to fans of horrible horror films. He's been making no budget movies like this since the mid 1980s, but sadly doesn't seem to have improved much over the past two decades. DORM was shot on digital and the picture quality is decent for the format. However, it's otherwise full of technical goofs usually attributed to amateur first-time filmmakers. There are tons of continuity errors, it's badly paced, it's padded, the attempts at humor almost always miss the mark and the editing, acting, script, gore fx and sound are all pretty lousy. The Clare character is only seen in close-up and doesn't interact with most of the rest of the cast, which makes it seem like all of her scenes were shot separately. The zombie make-up is almost nonexistent. A little dab of faint green paint and a little blood is all there is to it. There are three instances of T&A in the film, which is basically all it has to offer its target audience.

I'm a fan of Jackey Hall's and loved her in DORM OF THE DEAD. She plays a bitchy college girl who ends up turning her worst enemy into a zombie. If you like down and dirty zombie flicks, DORM OF THE DEAD will fit the bill! The two other girls in this movie I liked are Tiffany Shepis and Ciara Richards. Tiffany is pretty well known - I have seen her before in THE HAZING, SCARECROW, the trailer for HOMESIC and TED BUNCY. Ciara is a new actress but she actually had the biggest role in DORM OF THE DEAD. She plays a goth girl who ends up being turned into a zombie by Jackey. Also the music in DORM OF THE DEAD is incredible - sounds like someone was trying to copy Rob Zombie but doing a good job of it.