"The Dorm That Dripped Blood" or under its UK title "Pranks" is another one of the long line of 80's slasher movies, but what set this apart is that it simply ended up on the Video nasty list, which I can't see why, but this movie is more grittier than most of the slashers that came from this period and it does succeed in some places, but it does falter in others.
The opening murder really does set the tone of what's to come and there are plenty of deaths to keep the gore hounds happy even if some of them are a bit badly done and this movie does well at keeping the viewer in suspense and the mystery element is handled rather well and the final showdown was quite brutal and shocking for it's time.
But what does let this movie down are the wafer thin characters, which were dull and uninteresting and personally didn't feel for any of them and the dialogue was sleep inducing most of the time. Laurie Lapinski gave us a one-dimensional and extremely unapproachable final girl, whilst the rest of the cast were never offered anything authentic to escape their stereotype. Even Daphne Zuniga gets no chance to shine in her short screen time, despite her gruesome death scene.
All in all "The Dorm That Dripped Blood" has all the right ingredients, it just has something missing and could have been a whole lot better if it had a better more convincing cast.
The opening murder really does set the tone of what's to come and there are plenty of deaths to keep the gore hounds happy even if some of them are a bit badly done and this movie does well at keeping the viewer in suspense and the mystery element is handled rather well and the final showdown was quite brutal and shocking for it's time.
But what does let this movie down are the wafer thin characters, which were dull and uninteresting and personally didn't feel for any of them and the dialogue was sleep inducing most of the time. Laurie Lapinski gave us a one-dimensional and extremely unapproachable final girl, whilst the rest of the cast were never offered anything authentic to escape their stereotype. Even Daphne Zuniga gets no chance to shine in her short screen time, despite her gruesome death scene.
All in all "The Dorm That Dripped Blood" has all the right ingredients, it just has something missing and could have been a whole lot better if it had a better more convincing cast.