What’s in the water o’er at The Horror Channel? Their original programming continues to impress me greatly – first with SHADOW FALLS and now even more so with HEARTLAND HORRORS: SEASON ONE, another online series rounded up in its entirety for DVD.
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The best thing about Dorm of the Dead is its title, but don’t expect the movie to fulfill that promise. In fact, don’t expect the movie to seem much like a movie. It’s a hair shy of unwatchable.
Dealing with a zombie outbreak on the campus of Arkham University, very little of it takes place in a dorm. Very little of it actually involves zombies. It’s more like an excuse for several extended, scored-with-bad-techno sex scenes that recall the lurid but boring Cinemax After Dark features, only shot on video. The box plays up the fact that Andrea Ownbey – aka “Miss Howard Stern” – is one of the stars, but this means nothing to me. Besides, none of the girls really look attractive, and that includes B-movie staple Tiffany Shepis.
There are two things the Donald Farmer-directed Dorm does well: 1) Making special effects look homemade, and 2) overdoing it on sequences involving people walking. When your credits feature an actor who calls himself “Dukey Flyswatter,” you know you’re not to take it seriously, but I’d rather not take it at all.
Running Time: 90 Minutes
Director: Donald Farmer
Cast: Tiffany Shepis, Andrea Ownbey, Jackey Hall, Jeff Dylan Graham
Link: Buy it on Amazon
As if the name didn’t suggest such, Shadow Falls is a creepy small town. Located somewhere in the Midwest, it apparently died in the mid-’80s after something terrible happened at its local hospital. Now it appears to be all but deserted, but an evil still populates within its borders. Billed as the first horror TV series made for the Internet, the first eight episodes have made it to DVD as SHADOW FALLS: VOLUME 1.
With many strikes against it from the outset (ultra-low budget, shot on video, no-name cast and crew), I was as skeptical as anyone to check out this Horror Channel show, but it’s surprisingly pretty good. For one thing, it contains a great air of mystery. For another, most episodes are under 10 minutes in length, so they have little chance to bore. Each stands alone, but as becomes evident about midway through, there are threads woven and clues embedded in each that eventually will come to an all-makes-sense end (in episode 32, according to writer/director Kendal Sinn in the extra-feature interviews).
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