The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982)

College students Joanne (Laurie Lapinski), Craig (Stephen Sacks), Brian (David Snow) and Patti (Pamela Holland) take on the job of emptying an old abandoned dorm of its furniture before its torn down. They soon find themselves stalked by a killer.

Bottom of the barrel slasher flick. The budget is (obviously) VERY low, the script is terrible and the acting is lousy--even for a slasher flick! The killings themselves are OK but obviously faked and there's the expected gratuitous female nudity that's so obviously shoved in that I felt sorry for the poor actress who had to do it. It all leads up to an admittedly good ending that I didn't see coming. However one good moment doesn't make the rest of the film even remotely bearable. This is only of interest for the then unknown Daphne Zuniga in her screen debut--but she's killed off early on. Even the most forgiving slasher movie fan will hate this one. Skip it.

Fmovies: One of a multitude of slashers that appeared in the early eighties, Pranks is notable only for an early performance by Daphne Zuniga (The Sure Thing, The Fly 2); her character dies fairly early on, and the rest of the film is totally forgettable.

During their Christmas break, a group of students volunteer to clear a condemned college building of its furniture. A crazy killer, however, throws a spanner in the works by methodically bumping off the youngsters one by one in a variety of gruesome ways.

Exploiting every stalk 'n' slash cliché in the book, director Jeffrey Obrow delivers a tedious and unexciting horror that had me praying for the characters to be killed, so that I could get on with watching something more worthwhile. The majority of the deaths (which, let's face it, is why we generally watch this kind of film) are brief and not that gory; the only truly grisly imagery comes right at the end when the bodies of the victims are discovered by the remaining survivor (there is one notably bloody dismembered corpse—the film could've done with more).

At the last minute, the film saves itself from the disgrace of receiving the lowest possible score from me by having a nice unexpectedly downbeat ending, but this really is one for slasher completists only.

"The Dorm that Dripped Blood" is about what you might expect of a slasher flick, making it completely enjoyable. One thing about which I'm curious is the director Stephen Carpenter. There is a Stephen Carpenter who wrote the screenplay for the "Ocean's Eleven" remake and created the TV series "Grimm". Is this the same Stephen Carpenter, does anyone know? Whatever the case, it's probably not important. What's important is to see the college students meet their ugly demises while they prepare a dormitory to get demolished. A noticeable cast member is Daphne Zuniga, who later played Princess Vespa in Mel Brooks's "Spaceballs".

A really interesting mix of things.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood fmovies. The movie is another attempt at a horror movie that kills off "teenagers" with a mysterious killer on the loose. So another slasher with a "surprise" twist. There are some decent effects here (if you consider the budget and the time frame this was made), but overall there is not that much nastiness going.

The acting is below average. But I guess it is sufficient for what it is supposed to be. While it isn't too long, it does dabble in scenes that are quite unnecessary. Then again, you have to make a movie about 90 minutes long so ... I've seen worse, but apart from the great title and cover art (American Blu Ray), there is not much this actually can offer

Dorm That Dripped Blood, The (1982)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Another entry in the never-ending run of slasher movies that followed Friday THE 13TH. This film here tells the story of five college students who stay back on Christmas break in order to get their old dorm ready for destruction. While the group are doing their thing, a maniac shows up with some new ways to kill them. This film was released in Britian (and on DVD) as PRANKS and apparently was also known as DEATH DORM but whatever the title is the end result is that there's a reason this film has been forgotten. The first ten minutes or so are actually fairly good with some effective kills but after that the thing just falls apart and really turns out to be one of the most boring and painful slashers of the decade. What really killed the movie was the incredibly bad pacing, which drags the film down so much that it was rather painful watching the movie because everything just seemed so dragged out. The final "chase" in the film lasted over and hour, which is just downright overkill but the entire movie is like this. Many of the death scenes feature builds up that are so dragged out that the suspense is drained out of them but then again, I'm not sure any suspense could have happened no matter what. As is to be expected, the performances are all forgettable and the direction really doesn't pack any punches either. Worse of all is that the kill scenes aren't all that impressive and even worse is that there's a pretty good ending, which gets wasted in a film like this. The payoff certainly isn't what I expected to see but it's hard to recommend sitting through the rest of this movie just for that.