Pranks

Pranks (aka. The Dorm that Dripped Blood) (1982)

This is yet another slasher movie from the early 80’s that attempted to cash in on the popularity of movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween. This time around you have a group of college kids that are staying in a dorm after classes have ended. The college is retiring the dorm and they are responsible for cleaning it and getting rid of the furniture. So there you have the setup with the students all alone in the mostly empty dorm building. One by one they meet grisly deaths until it is down to the last girl and the killer that is hunting her. The movie does toss a couple of twists at the end, which I’ll not spoil here, but all in all it is a pretty standard story.

Pranks starts off really cool with a few cool kills right away. But then the movie slows way down as we are forced to see the characters wander around the building in the dark. While there are a couple of well-executed jump scares, most of the movie is really boring and repetitive. When the killings get rolling again things do pick up, but that isn’t until the last 10 minutes or so and by then I really didn’t care what happened anymore. Oh and I know this is a horror movie and more specifically a slasher flick, but I do so hate it when they are faced with a creepy dangerous guy in the dorm and all decide to split up! The performances are bad, even for a slasher movie. When you hire a cast that can’t even play scared convincingly on screen you know you are in trouble. The only bright spot is a very young Daphne Zuniga in her first movie role. She doesn’t have much to do, but in her few scenes is far better than the rest of the cast.

So this is a slasher flick so we need to talk about the gore and the nudity. In spite of a decent body count of 7 the special effects aren’t very good. In fact the best effects really are used up early on in the first couple of kills. They do try and make things a bit more interesting by making the kills clever (tossed in a steam cooker, drill to the noggin’) but it just doesn’t help. Also again I’m not trying to be creepy but this is a rated ‘R’ slasher flick so I expected some nudity. I hear there is another print floating around out there, but the one that I watched (with the Pranks title card) lacked any nudity at all. Seriously making one of these movies isn’t rocket science how do you screw it up?

In the end Pranks starts off with a bang, but ends up being less than mediocre. Still there is an interesting twist at the end that I’ll give the filmmakers some credit for, but it isn’t enough to save Pranks for me. I can’t really recommend this sub par slasher movie, especially since it isn’t on DVD and the VHS seems to fetch a pretty penny.

1 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer