Also known as Death Dorm and Pranks, this is a torturous slasher film, originally made as the graduation film for directors Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow and co-writer Stacey Giachino who were studying film at the University of California in Los Angeles. Carpenter and Obrow had clearly learned their lessons well enough to be able to mimic the mechanics of the slasher film – lots of roaming POV shots, plenty of false scares, a red herring or two, a smattering of gore – but not enough to come up with anything new or particularly interesting.
As the Christmas break approaches (the festive season is barely touched upon and the film could easily have taken place at just about any time of the year), the university dorm Morgan Meadows Hall is due to be closed and demolished and a group of students have volunteered to stay behind and clear out the building before the demolition team moves in. But there’s a deranged killer among them and soon the group and various visitors, passers-by and innocent bystanders are meeting grisly ends.
Technically, The Dorm That Dripped Blood is a mess. Carpenter’s photography is often murky and poorly lit, even the DVD and blu-ray releases finding it difficult to penetrate the murk; the editing (by Carpenter and Obrow) is inept and Christopher Young’s score (he later went on to better things scoring Hellraiser (1987)), is generic and uninspiring. Matthew Mungle’s gore effects are the best thing about it, some of the killings being particularly inventive and grisly enough for the film to have run into censorship problems, both in the States and the UK. The drill to the head scene probably contributed to The Dorm That Dripped Blood (under the title Pranks) languishing briefly on the UK’s “video nasties” list (it was never prosecuted and was quickly removed).
Performances are what you’d expect from a largely amateur cast, most of who ever worked again though Daphne Zuniga, dispatched relatively early on, later turned up in The Initiation (1984), Spaceballs (1987), Last Rites (1988) and The Fly II (1989) among many other things. To be fair, a fully professional cast would struggle with the terrible script that gives us no clues at all as to who any of these people are but has plenty of dreadful dialogue to offer. The characters are just chess pieces to be shunted around the narrative until it’s their time to die.
When the killer is finally revealed the already dreary script grinds to a complete halt as he explains how and why he did what he did at quite extraordinary length before we get the film’s most notable aspect, a bleak and downbeat ending which seems to end with the killer triumphant and free to kill again. Most of the film consists of people talking, wandering about in the dark or making the kind of idiotic decisions that we’d grown used to in the slasher genre occasionally interspersed with gory slayings. It isn’t a particularly long film (though the blu-ray release adds unseen footage previously thought to have been lost) but it feels like one and it manages to outstay its welcome very quickly.
Carpenter went on to make a string of low budget horror films, including The Power (1984), The Kindred (1987) and Soul Survivors (2001) (he also wrote Servants of Twilight (1991) for Obrow and co-created the television series Grimm (2011-2017)), while Obrow also directed Legend of the Mummy (1998) and They Are Among Us (2004). At least they showed some sign of improvement, The Dorm That Dripped Blood remaining the least polished and accomplished film on their filmographies. Perhaps inevitably, it has now started to accrue an undeserved cult following but it truth, apart from the gore effects, there’s nothing here that you won’t find done much better elsewhere.
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