THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD: Let’s Put On A (Horror) Show

To embrace the slasher genre of hor­ror is to admit you have an appre­ci­a­tion for the sim­pler things.  This much-vilified but oddly resilient style of hor­ror film has an endur­ing appeal to many fans because it presents genre at its sim­plest, a kind of cin­e­matic junk food that strips away ambi­tious themes and nar­ra­tive intri­cacy to cre­ate a min­i­mal­ist set of sus­pense mechan­ics.  In other words, the slasher movie ain’t pretty and it ain’t good for you — but if it’s done well, it can be sat­is­fy­ing on a pri­mal level.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood — alias Pranks — fits that “cin­e­matic junk food” bill nicely, eschew­ing com­plex­ity to just con­cen­trate on the stalk­ing and slash­ing.  The plot deals with a hand­ful of stu­dents who stay behind at cam­pus dur­ing the Christmas hol­i­day to break down a co-op dor­mi­tory that is being closed. Joanne (Laurie Lapinski) is the nom­i­nal leader and likely “final girl” of the bunch, Brian (David Snow) is the hunky guy who shows inter­est in Joanne, Patti (Pamela Holland) is the high-strung mem­ber of the gang and Craig (Stephen Sachs) is the impul­sive jokester.

Unfortunately for this quar­tet, they are in dan­ger and they don’t even know it: a mys­tery killer has bumped off a few periph­eral char­ac­ters already and decides to focus on the dorm-cleaning heroes.  They also have to con­tend with creepy stu­dent John Hemmit (Woody Roll), a dorm-dweller who refuses to abdi­cate his room and who also seems like the most likely sus­pect.  Plenty of stalk­ing and a lit­tle slash­ing fol­lows, plus there’s a twist end­ing that really goes for the gusto.

If viewed through crit­i­cal eyes, The Dorm That Dripped Blood is lit­tle more than an exer­cise in slasher tropes.  The sto­ry­line bor­rows heav­ily from a vari­ety of arche­types for this sub­genre — Halloween, Friday The 13th and Black Christmas, to name a few — and the plot­ting cheats in places by allow­ing the killer to get around with implau­si­ble speed.  The char­ac­ter­i­za­tions are all pretty stock, with each char­ac­ter defined by one main char­ac­ter­is­tic, and there are so few of them that you’ll prob­a­bly guess who the killer is at least twenty min­utes before the reveal.

However, when The Dorm That Dripped Blood gets down to busi­ness, it totally deliv­ers the blood-spurting goods.  Co-writers/directors Jeff Obrow and Stephen Carpenter really invest them­selves in the set­pieces — Carpenter also shot the film and Obrow did the edit­ing — and they man­age some very effec­tive moments.  Highlights in this area include a breath­tak­ingly cruel and ener­getic kill that closes the first act and another grim mur­der scene later on that involves an elec­tric drill.  These moments are aided by gore effects by Matthew Mungle that are unusu­ally good for such a shoe­string ven­ture and add nice grue­some “excla­ma­tion points” to each setpiece.

Better yet, the film really steps up its game in the third act.  Even if you guess who the killer is, the film­mak­ers take the unusual step of unmask­ing the killer while there’s still a good twenty min­utes of run­ning time left.  This allows the film­mak­ers to devote that last twenty min­utes to pure cat-and-mouse sus­pense mate­r­ial and, with­out get­ting into spoil­ers, Obrow and Carpenter cap the film with a final cruel flour­ish likely to make view­ers say “did they just do that?”

It’s also worth men­tion­ing that The Dorm That Dripped Blood is steeped in a cer­tain “vibe” that a cer­tain type of hor­ror fan devel­ops a crav­ing for if they see enough vin­tage slasher fare.  The use of real cam­pus loca­tions, includ­ing a gen­uine, con­vinc­ingly dreary co-op dorm build­ing, gives the film a dis­tinc­tive atmos­phere.  It also helps that Carpenter’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy has a grungy styl­ish­ness and Christopher Young’s Herrmann-derived score replaces the expected syn­the­siz­ers with good, old-fashioned shriek­ing vio­lins.  The early-1980’s look of the world depicted in the film add that final dol­lop of period charm (par­tic­u­larly the uni­sex shag hair­cuts our pro­tag­o­nists favor).

In short, The Dorm That Dripped Blood might not hit the clas­sic heights of a Halloween or a Black Christmas but it gets the job the done with enthu­si­asm and a crude but charm­ing “let’s put on a show” sense of flair.  If you go for slasher flicks, its the kind of cine-junk food that will hit that sweet spot.