The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 14

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Dripping blood is not as exciting as gushing blood!

In the realm of films about college students being hunted by killers, The Dorm That Dripped Blood needs to attend Summer School. It’s an overly long and tedious-looking student film that spends too much time teasing and not enough time doing.

Before Viewing

This trailer, which reveals the film’s original title Pranks, shows a number of students in a dorm or other campus areas dealing with tricks played by other students. Plastic bugs in the food, turning off the power, stabbing people. You know, normal college jokes. That’s when the screaming starts, as well as a number of kitchen appliances. It’s The Dorm That Dripped Blood tonight!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Outside a college party at Dayton Hall, a male student is grabbed from behind, choked, and killed by an unseen person. Tim (Robert Frederick) and Joanne (Laurie Lapinski) talk about moving in together since he’s leaving tomorrow to go skiing and she will be staying on campus. Joanne and four other students are helping clean out Dayton Hall over Christmas break so it can be torn down in the New Year to build apartments. The next day Debbie (Daphne Zuniga) informs Joanne she has to leave early and can’t stay to help. Brian (David Snow), Patti (Pamela Holland), and Craig (Stephen Sachs) arrive and start getting to work with the inventory of the dormitory.

Before Debbie leaves, Joanne asks her to leave her inventory downstairs. Her parents arrive to pick her up by car, and her father (Richard Cowgill) heads into the dorm to see what’s taking her so long. An unseen person in black Converse sneakers and carrying a baseball bat with nails in it smashes the father’s head in the stairwell. Debbie comes down the stairs and sees her Dad which makes her scream and run outside. The killer strangles the mom (Kay Beth), runs over Debbie off-screen–crushing her skull–and dumps them all into the car.

Patti sees a strange man, John (Woody Roll) hanging around the dumpster. No one else is supposed to be on campus, so the characters take turns trying to find him and tell him he needs to leave. Later while they’re playing pool they see John peeking in a window, but he disappears soon afterwards. A local man, Bobby Lee (Dennis Ely), stops by to pay for the desks he’s buying and tries to pick up Joanne, who rebuffs him. The custodian, Bill (Jake Jones), is washing his face in the bathroom when someone using a drill that he lost earlier kills him–by drilling into his skull. The dinner table that the kids have set for their meal gets trashed–and they all assume it’s John.

A police officer stops by to take a report, indicating they picked up a man with John’s description earlier and not to worry. Joanne hears someone on the roof (of a 30-story block of rooms) and suddenly the phone is dead and the lights go out. Brian is attacked in a stairwell by someone with a machete. Craig and Patti look to see if they can turn the lights back on when someone knocks out Patti and dumps her in an industrial pressure cooker. Craig returns to Joanne’s room bruised, claiming John attacked him on the way back.

There’s a knock on Joanne’s door. It’s John wearing black Converse shoes and carrying a bloody machete. They wait until he leaves and then Craig suggests they go on the offensive. Joanne is grabbed by John, who mutters something about needing to get her out of there. She backs into a freezer where she sees a dismembered Brian. She screams and grabs a machete attacking John. She finds Craig and they try to escape via a tunnel, but John comes for them, attacking Craig. Joanne smashes John on the head with a board, killing him.

Craig is so ecstatic, he admits to Joanne that it was he that killed everyone so that he could get close to Joanne. He loves her and shows her all the bodies he racked up to prove it. Craig grabs Joanne when she tries to escape and knocks her out. The police show up as does Bobby Lee who is around looking for disused treasure. He sees Craig with Joanne and begins fighting him. The police, believing that Bobby Lee is the killer (since he’s not complying with their instructions), shoot him dead. Craig picks up Joanne’s unconscious body and dumps her in the incinerator, leaving quickly. The police wonder why the place smells so bad but resign themselves saying the place is being torn down anyway.

“It’s not a joke, the power is out and the phone is dead.” – Joanne

You know that the horror film you’re about to watch is going to be trouble when the trailer calls the movie Pranks, the film’s title card is Death Dorm, and IMDb lists it as The Dorm That Dripped Blood. It’s the second movie in a theme week made up of collegiate slasher films inspired by Randy’s quote from Scream 2. In that film, he asks the killer what his favorite scary film is. “Wait. Let me guess. The House On Sorority Row? Dorm That Dripped Blood? Splatter University? Graduation Day? Final Exam?” And with that, I have the majority of films to review in a theme week. The goal of this exercise is to compare a number of supposedly similar films to one another and see how they stack up (the bodies–and other things).

The Dorm That Dripped Blood is immediately different from most of the other films reviewed to date, even in the low-budget slasher realm. This film was shot in 16mm by students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during their winter break when they could have nearly unfettered access to the facilities. Writers/directors Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter, along with additional writer Stacey Giachino, were film students during the 1980/81 term when they shot the film. Obrow would go on to direct The Power, The Kindred, and Servants of Twilight, with Carpenter writing the screenplays. The film feels like an overly long student film that is padded with additional footage in order to make close to a 90-minute running time. Minutes of footage with the camera panning around a darkened building might be there to provide atmosphere but only serves to slow things down. Too much emphasis is placed on the setup of strange things going on for two days, and trying to hunt down John–wherever he’s hiding. Another working title for the film was The Third Night, which explains how long it takes to get to the majority of the murders.

The tediousness comes from the inexperience of the filmmakers. They were attempting to create a film that had some weight and build-up to the killings and chases. Unfortunately, it slows the entire film down. The low-budget look of the film might be fine if the action was a bit more present. But when there’s nothing going on it highlights the poor lighting and cardboard acting. But the largest conundrum is the motivations of the killer and his methods. Audiences find out that Craig is the killer during his five-minute speech about why and how he killed everyone–as he shows Joanne (literally) where the bodies are. The film opens with a young man running through an alley by the condemned building, hiding in some bushes. He is choked and killed before the opening credits roll. Who is he and why was he killed? Craig never talks about this kill. Did this person discover something that Craig was up to? Or is Craig really completely off his rocker, and this is a warm-up? His motivations as explained are that he loves Joanne, and he had to eliminate people that were in his way of getting to her. Obviously Brian, but also Patti since they hang around a lot. When it comes down to it, Tim is the smartest of the bunch because he goes skiing instead of hanging with his girlfriend. But then why did Craig kill Debbie? She was about to leave anyway. Maybe he killed Debbie’s father in his excitement for everything to get started. Obviously, he would then need to kill the mother and Debbie as well, because…you know. This doesn’t make much sense. And neither does killing Bill, other than he was around as a potential suspect so best to eliminate him early on.

The film is also loaded with red herrings in an attempt to provide more than three other possible people as the killers. Though does anyone at any time think that it may be Patti? When Patti sees John Hemmit (which sounds a bit like “hermit”) he’s digging through a dumpster like a homeless drifter of some kind. Yet he is a student who lives in the dorm with them. His motivations for being there, and then conveniently not being there are never addressed, which makes him seem like a likely suspect to the killing. He’s just portrayed as a crazy person. Then Bobby Lee shows up to buy the desks that Joanne is selling. He’s got money and apparently needs a huge number of desks. Oh, and he also likes to dumpster dive for things that people have thrown away, but are still in good shape. Chalk up weirdo number two. He is especially suspect after he randomly calls Joanne in the middle of the night while his girlfriend is sleeping over. What a creep! Of course, there always could be another person who shows up as the killer, but giving the job to Craig really seems to come from nowhere. Especially after the setup of showing the killer wearing black Converse sneakers, twice, which end up on John’s feet somehow in an attempt to continue the ruse that it was somehow him. At this point, let’s address the fact that this film was originally called Pranks. There exists one prank in the film, and that’s Craig putting a plastic spider (somehow) on his eggs on the grill. It must be why the name was changed.

For a horror film inspired by Friday the 13th and its ilk, Death Dorm is not really scary. There’s a lot of running around this giant dormitory co-op building in the dark where things might happen, as well as a couple of fake-out scares. The power randomly goes out while Joanne is in the elevator and someone opens the hatch on the roof. Fortunately, it’s friendly handyman Bill who was on top of the elevator the whole time just seeing if he could lend the young coed a hand. But Joanne is a hearty character and smart too (other than when she agrees that splitting up is a good idea). She’s in charge of a two-week project to help close out this building, so she’s not scared easily (except for sometimes when she screams). It’s apparent from the beginning that she’s the main focus of the film and that she will be the Final Girl. This is the name given to the last female victim in these types of horror films. Like Alice in Friday the 13th or Laurie in Halloween, her job is to survive up until the end of the film and find a way to stop the killer. Except that’s not what happens here.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood pulls a trick play at the 11th hour and switches up a tried and true formula for dozens of slasher films to date. Instead of finding a way out of the basement to alert the police, or stopping Craig with one of his own tools, she is knocked unconscious (as sometimes happens to the Final Girl near the end), but Craig then dumps her into the furnace. Poof! She’s dead, and the killer wins. Craig disappears as the police arrive to investigate some other bodies that have been found, and Joanne will never be found. Tim will return from skiing only to discover his girlfriend is missing. What a terribly dark ending. This twist redeems what may otherwise be an overly long and tedious, nearly-scary slasher film. Stay tuned for the rest of this week as 31 Days of Horror cuts more classes than a psychopath at an all-girls school.

Report Card

• Arithmetic: Ten deaths, including a three-fer with Debbie and her parents, as well as (shockingly) the Final Girl. Exceed expectations.
• Science: Outrageous situations with a different weapon for each killing, including spiked bat, machete, and industrial pressure cooker. Exceeds expectations.
• Phys Ed: While lots of cardio is emphasized (plenty of walking and exceptional stair work), Death Dorm fails to get any zone minutes. Below expectations.
• Fine Arts: Poorly lit, staged, and edited. Provide better references next time. Below expectations.
• Final Grade: C-
• Teacher comments: The title of the film (one of the titles of the film), is a riff on the 1971 anthology film The House That Dripped Blood, which has little to nothing in common with this film.