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The movie takes place during the last few days before Christmas Break at Billingsley University. We start out in the dorm room of Styles and Booker McFee, played by Patrick Renna and Chris Owen- or more recognizable as the catcher from “The Sandlot” and Chuck Sherman from the “American Pie” movies. Styles has just ordered a hooker for his little brother, so he can finally lose his virginity. Elsewhere in the dorm a student awaits the arrival of the new foreign exchange student, one girl is trying to avoid the geek she drunkenly made out with the night before and two airheads gossip about all of them. Enter two criminals and a bag containing $30,000 and “Dorm Daze” becomes an unexpected and gigantic comedy (term used ever-so-lightly) of errors. This is basically an update, or rip-off, of the quintessential movie farce, “What’s Up Doc?”.

Knowing that the movie is born from every recognizable formula of its genre, directors Scott and David Hillenbrand do deserve some credit for attempting to give “Dorm Daze” some kind of originality, or at least making an effort to disguise them. A lot of the humor in sex comedies comes from farce, but this movie has a huge abundance of comic misunderstandings. Unfortunately there is so much that the plot becomes too absurd too quickly, the Hillenbrands find themselves reaching for the next bit of sham, eventually the film just becomes preposterous. It’s easy to see what they were trying to do; but the structure just fails. The material covered in this movie cannot fill an hour and forty minutes, no matter how many criminals, prostitutes and mix-ups come into play.

There are a lot of stupid and worthless comedies that get wide releases; people will just keep plunking down their money for this puerile brand of humor. At one point this got so bad that I actually found guilty pleasure in “Saving Silverman.” This movie didn’t even get that benefit; it had a small theatrical run last fall. Gauging the comic value of “Dorm Daze” is not hard to do, how much does the film make you laugh? Personally the movie registered around a one, a movie with a longer running time than the average comedy made me laugh only once.

“Dorm Daze” is a film that is so dreadfully unfunny it could potentially send people retreating to find solace in their copies of “Tomcats” and “The New Guy.”

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originally posted: 08/29/04 17:09:50
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