Delayed Reaction: Dorm Daze

The Pitch: How many wacky confusions can one movie have?

Before leaving for Christmas break, the stories of the students in a dorm collide and interweave in crazy ways.

Let me set the scene for you. The year is probably 2004. I'm on summer vacation and in high school. It's probably 2 or 3 in the morning and I'm watching HBO or Showtime. I see that this movie called Dorm Daze is coming on. It's a National Lampoon movie, which doesn't mean much in 2004. It does mean that there will probably be some nudity in it, and in 2004 at 2 am, that's enough for me. It's got Danielle Fishel from Boy Meets World and Tatyana Ali from The Fresh Prince of Bell Air. I don't see them in many movies. There's a few other familiar faces that I recognize and to this day couldn't tell you the names of. So, I begin the movie.

This movie is bad. The jokes aren't funny. The acting isn't great. The budget is next to nothing. The writing is contrived.

And still, I remembered it for years. It took on an almost mythic quality for me. I joke that I remember it like it was a fever dream. I wasn't even sure that what I saw existed. Was I just really tired that night? Could I have imagined parts being as insane as they were. Did I really see what I thought I saw? It wasn't until a friend brought up that he saw the movie recently that I confirmed that it was real. All of it.

You see, Dorm Daze, for all its faults is the most effectively convoluted story I've ever seen in a movie. As a rule, I hate stories built on misunderstandings. It's a narrative crutch. Dorm Daze shatters that though by building the story on more and more misunderstandings until it's genuinely impressive that they can keep track of it all. There are so many moving parts in this movie and it keeps track of them all. I'm certain that screenwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller must've had charts figuring this all out as they wrote it. Directors David and Scott Hillenbrand had a grid with the layout of the dorm to keep track of where everyone was at any given time. I'm genuinely impressed with the effort that went into that aspect of the movie. It's like they knew that since no one was paying attention to this tiny little movie they had the freedom to try something completely insane, and they succeeded.

Anyone who has ever enjoyed an episode of Frasier or Modern Family where things build and build until everything falls apart at the end should really check this out. This is easily the worst movie that I'll not ironically recommend to people.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend