THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (a.k.a. Pranks) *** USA 1981 Dir: Stephen Carpenter, Jeffrey Obrow. 81 mins
During the Christmas holidays, five students have volunteered to help shut down a condemned dorm, just as a mystery murderer knocks out the power, cuts the phone lines and kills their friends with power drills and industrial steam cookers. Chief red herring is a 6-foot-plus frizzy haired weirdo (Woody Roll) who hangs around skips in the dead of night and even holds a bloodied machete in a sinister fashion at one crucial point.
Aided by an effectively tense, eerie score by a pre-HELLRAISER Christopher Young, this micro-budget slasher movie offers no one to sympathise with, but it does have some nasty kills (watch out for the spiked baseball bat!) and a mean-spirited ending in which the giggling killer cleverly frames an innocent man for the murders before shoving the unconscious final girl into an incinerator. God bless us, everyone!
Review by Steven West