| Product: |
Pranks (DVD) |
| Date: |
17.03.08 (78 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: One pretty actress and a decent location
Disadvantages: Everything apart from the one pretty actress and decent location
A review of just the film.
This is a lousy video nasty from 1982. It's tedious, not gory and has almost nothing going for it. Quite why it was banned is a mystery; the fact that it was means that it's probably been seen by considerably more people than it deserves, myself included.
Four students - two guys, two girls - stay behind in their college dorm when everyone else goes away for Christmas. They're meant to be packing up and selling the furniture. But - oh my! - there's a psycho killer on the loose and enough extraneous characters wandering around to provide both red herrings and murder-fodder.
So what can I say about this, beyond 'it's really boring'? Well, it's also not acted very well. Or plotted or scripted with any real competence. Or directed with any flair. And it isn't scary in the slightest.
A dormitory - especially the nasty concrete building here - could be a great location for a slasher film, and it's probably the best thing about this. But it isn't used effectively at all, even though the film does all the obvious things - people getting stuck in lifts, scary noises from the roof, long chases in those big basements full of pipes that American buildings always have...
The cast are generally forgettable, with the exception of one strikingly pretty girl who sadly dies too soon. We don't get to see the killer's face until the last few minutes, and at some point I think every male character is made to act suspiciously. But the ending doesn't come as a surprise or a twist, mainly because I was so unengaged by the notional mystery that I didn't care who the killer was. That the characters keep splitting up when they're all really scared represents a film that can't be bothered to come up with anything but the most rudimentary plotting.
There's no suspense at all. Even the obvious shock moments are fumbled terribly. The very conventional soundtrack lets us know when something scary is meant to be happening. There are a lot of killer's-point-of-view shots, but they don't ratchet up the suspense because most of them go on far too long and it's impossible to care about the people being stalked anyway. Lots of scenes go on and on for no reason, like the interminable shots of people walking up and down stairwells.
The gore scenes are weak, almost always cutting away before the good stuff (although I think the version I saw was slightly cut). It has one of the least convincing garrottings I've ever seen. The film doesn't have a high enough body count, although there's a murder right at the start that's never even alluded to again, suggesting that they were floundering around to find characters to kill. I've no idea why the film's called 'Pranks'. Only one person plays a prank in the film, but he's one of the victimised students. It was originally released as 'The Dorm That Dripped Blood', which at least made a bit more sense.
I think it was made by students, so I probably shouldn't be too hard on it. Apart from the location and the one pretty actress, there are maybe two seconds where the use of shadow is quite nice (probably unintentionally). That really is all the film has going for it.
You can get this on amazon for less than £2. Honestly, don't bother.
Summary: A tedious horror film given an ill-deserved boost by being banned
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