It's The Least Wonderful Time Of The Year

Oh boy, another winter....
Another long, boring, COLD winter spent with my feet wet and my nose running. Life in Michigan is truly bleak once the snow comes each year, and it finally started in full force this week. When I looked out my window and saw that crap lightly settled on the roof of my car, it was like a slap in the face waking me up from a semi-tolerable dream. "HEY, jerk! Reality here, just reminding you that EVERYTHING SUCKS and it's gonna stay this way through late February. AH-HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!!!"


So, it looks like the next several months for me will be nothing but sliding across parking lots, sitting inside a dark house, and cursing myself for not abandoning everything I own and skipping town for Florida while I was still young enough to get away with it. Heck, I STILL seriously consider doing so come each January when the frigid air has become so stale that it's actually painful to breathe, and automobile exhaust has blackened those ugly piles of snow that sit on the side of every road for what seems like eternity. Yes, Michigan in the winter is such a WONDERLAND! Blegh.

Luckily, there are a few things that lift my spirits in these times of woe. First is (you guessed it!) snack foods. For example, check out these bad boys I found at my local Kroger last week. Cheap Christmas cookies:

(Look, I'm not a professional photographer, OK?)

I LOVE cheap Christmas cookies....especially those of the variety we see above. Simple, sprinkled, and in various Christmas-themed shapes. I could eat an entire box of these suckers in about three minutes. And look -- NOT ONLY are these cookies packaged in boxes that feature happy snowmen, but they also come in THREE flavors this year: sugar, butter, and shortbread! Each one tastes the same, but that's OK. I still declare Kroger brand cheap Christmas cookies the Snack of the Month!!!

Anyway, another thing that never fails to fill me with Yuletide cheer is (you guessed it again!) zombie movies. Let's take a gander at one.

Dorm of the Dead (2006)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800011/


Netflix description:
Clare (Jackey Hall) and Julie (Andrea Ownbey), the two snootiest girls at Arkham University, are nursing a grudge against goth rivals Sarah (Ciara Richards) and Allison (Adrianna Eder) when a strange accident triggers a zombie invasion, with Clare plotting to make Sarah the next victim. But the girls are all forced to run for their lives as the walking dead overrun the campus looking for their next meal.

Ah, nothing like sitting down to a no-budget zombie flick with a warm glass of eggnog in my hand to pass a lovely winter's eve. This one is about a mad college professor who brings a vial of zombie blood home from a trip to some Caribbean island. Of course, it winds up in the hands of one of his students, and before long, there's an all-out zombie outbreak on campus. You know -- standard stuff.

Dorm of the Dead had real promise. Sure, it's about as cheap as they come; but the concept was simple enough, and the characters were likable enough, to have potentially made for a unique and worthwhile experience. The problem, sadly, is that director Donald Farmer didn't approach this film from the right perspective. See, Dorm of the Dead would have been a lot of fun if it had been more IRONIC. Mr. Farmer, with something like this, you must play up the cheesiness and WINK at the audience. You've got to make us know that you, too, think this is stupid, Donny baby! Why didn't Farmer make this picture a little funnier? It could have WORKED without even changing the dialogue -- all that Dorm of the Dead really needed was a cast willing to ham things up just a little bit more. There was hope here!

Take, for example, how the undead outbreak begins in the first place. A rich, "popular" girl INTENTIONALLY infects a nerdy goth girl with zombie blood just because the goth girl laughed at her during a class. Now, turning someone into the the walking dead over something so trivial is obviously over-the-top, and the very concept begs to the laughed at. Yet, the entire scenario plays out in the movie as though it's supposed to be completely believable. In this respect, Dorm of the Dead comes across more like a slasher flick from the 80s than anything else -- corny, but not intentionally funny. The film almost seems like it's trying to be taken seriously, which is especially hard to swallow, considering that it looks like it was shot for about 37 dollars.


I mean, talk about cheap. The sets look like some unfinished suburban basement, and the gore effects are novelty store grade. I was also annoyed by the uneven nature of this picture's drama. Some of its characters are so dumb that they'd only be feasible in a comedy (like a girl who blackmails a professor, and moments later agrees to meet him in the dark basement of an abandoned building), while the few others who are actually a little intriguing (like the cute best friend of the previously-mentioned goth chick), get quickly ditched by the film in favor of much less interesting personalities. I found the repeated hit-and-miss of this movie quite irritating -- I'd start to like something, and then it would just go away. Poof!

I don't want to be totally down on Dorm of the Dead, though. I DO have to give it a bit of credit for at least getting made, and it IS admittedly more watchable than many other films of its nature that I've found through Netflix (you can stream this one instantly, by the way). Hey, it's not easy to complete a coherent film on such a shoestring budget. I also respect the fact that Donald Farmer somehow found multiple women willing to do nude scenes for this little cinematic opus (even if they weren't the main characters). In the end, Dorm of the Dead is a harmless enough zombie movie. It gets the job done, if somewhat sloppily.

2 out of 5.

b.