Dorm of the Dead

Hard working actor, director, producer, and writer Donald Farmer has tucked 22 films under his belt in a little over a decade. In this respect, he shares an affinity with his cinematic brethren, Edward D. Wood, Junior. However, there is a staunch difference between the filmmakers: Whereas Wood tried to make great features and failed, Farmer’s aesthetic credo seems to be “Good Enough.” What does a film made under said philosophy entail? Well, at the risk of being curt, there is a term in the genre for what Farmer’s latest production, Dorm of the Dead, is: Kids with cameras. And with this, the audience gets nothing more and, well, a lot less.

The emaciated plotline involves petty, playground-level jealousy between two sets of females, none of which are worthy of mention. The “crux” of the story involves Set A stealing a sample of zombie blood (don’t ask) and infecting one of Set B. What results (you might not be asking)? A zombie . . . well, epidemic seems to be a bit too gracious given the budget.

To be honest, the only thing which separates Dorm of the Dead and greatness is acting, script, budget, editing, special effects, direction, and cinematography . . . but it does have the whole soundtrack area covered. As blood ejaculates before a victim is bitten and wind battles for center stage while actors are mutedly conversing in a cemetery, someone mumbles, “Somebody’s been watching too many crappy movies.”

Now, I would initially highlight and mock the irony of the line but, given what I have come to understand, the amateur-to-the-point-of-unwatchable, nitty gritty piece of horror schlock has a following. Granted, I try to accommodate up-and-coming directors in a subverted genre but, even with this, I find myself struggling to give Dorm of the Dead benefit of the doubt even within its own perimeters for, unlike a Troma production which knows how and when to be bad, Farmer’s work seems to be setting the bar where it can comfortably meet its mediocre agenda with little hassle–which does little service to the viewer.

All of which would be more depressing if Dorm of the Dead, like most of its kin, hadn’t settled into a curious second act on the internet. Farmer’s filmography exists now in tattered uploads, archived torrents, and embedded players on streaming sites of the most disreputable kind. The films were never going to have a theatrical afterlife or a Criterion box set. What they have instead is a digital half-life, where they survive in the margins of pages built to monetize whatever traffic happens to wash up there.

The experience of actually viewing the film in this state is its own kind of meta-text. The video player is wedged between banner ads for offshore sportsbooks, meilleur casino en ligne suisse sites, AI-generated trading courses, and the occasional rogue antivirus pop-up. You can almost see the logic of the ad rotation: the algorithm has decided that anyone clicking through to watch Dorm of the Dead is in the same demographic as someone who’d click through on a roulette promo, and that demographic, apparently, has advertisers willing to pay for it. The film and the page surrounding it become a single piece of media — neither dignifies the other, but they share the same audience.

Which is its own kind of post-mortem on a film like this one. The economics of schlock have always favored quantity over quality — a few weeks of shooting, a few thousand dollars, a finished product that could be slotted onto a DVD shelf back when DVD shelves still mattered or, eventually, embedded in a webpage no one remembers building. That’s not exactly contempt for the audience, but it’s not far off either. And the line that finally lands, sitting through Dorm of the Dead, is not anything in the script — it’s the silent arrangement of the page surrounding it, where the film and its viewer and the ads flanking them are all transactions of a particularly attenuated kind.

Perhaps the opening, which threatens to be horror porn incarnate wherein the inadvertent lessons follow that if a guy beats his girlfriend’s lesbian lover, he will suffer the slings and arrows of zombie bites, atop the note that, ladies, if you leave your man high-and-dry, he may well unknowingly (thinking with the wrong head, again) accost a zombie slut, is a bit premature in that, nothing coincidentally aligns itself into a smidgeon of interest for the remaining 80 some odd minutes. As the youngest Dean in history waltzes out of “da club” before receiving a call on his cell from a student requesting . . . justification for her suspension(!), we learn that a medical school prof. wears his lab coat at all times, including coital sessions. I could go on, but I’d rather not revisit Donald Farmer’s Dorm of the Dead any more than I have to and suggest you do the same.

-Egregious Gurnow