“I bought us a big sausage.”

Justin’s rating: How much are they paying per year for room and board here? $500,000?

Justin’s review: If you looked at a “National Lampoon presents” college flick from the early 2000s and didn’t think “waste of space sex comedy,” then I’d genuinely be surprised. That’s right where my mind went as well, which is why I initially skipped off Dorm Daze. However, it turns out that there may be a lot more to this film than our assumptions presume.

Because, in essence, Dorm Daze is more of a chaotic and clever farce than anything else. Set in the fictional Southern California’s Billingsly University, this story largely revolves around the activities in a single co-ed dorm over the course of one wild afternoon.

Finals are done before Christmas, and everyone’s energy is way up. This is the kind of (what looks to be insanely expensive) living situation where everyone’s always running between rooms and stimulating interpersonal conflict and connections.

There’s a guy whose brother hired an escort named Dominique to help him lose his virginity, an innocent foreign exchange student also named Dominique is visiting, a girl who’s about to get expelled who ends up a con artist’s package, a missing bundle of $30,000, a lot of simmering romances, two busybodies (including everyone’s favorite Boy Meet World crush, Topanga) up in everyone’s business, a couple of identical purses, love notes put into the wrong hands, and a guy who lost all his money in Vegas who’s pretending that he doesn’t speak English to get some peace and quiet.

As I said, this is a farce — a comedy subgenre that’s never been that common or extremely popular with modern filmgoers. It’s a format that thrives on misdirection and misunderstandings, with everything building and building until it spills over into some sort of resolution.

The thing is, it’s a very odd choice of a format to wing at the type of viewers who might look at this and assume, as you did, “vapid teen sex comedy,” and being treated to a tangled web of many different plot threads and no main character. That’s probably why Dorm Daze bounced off a lot of viewers, causing it to bomb (and yet spawned two-ish sequels somehow).

Even though the farce format can be confusing — on purpose — it’s also always in motion with lots of characters and stories and setups. I really enjoyed getting to know all of this dorm’s characters through this chaos, being clued in on their various relationships and quirks. It reminded me of some of my favorite ’90s movies like Empire Records or PCU that plopped the viewer down into a single day of friends who have a lot of history together.

However, I’m not going to prop up Dorm Daze as this undiscovered classic. It’s just merely good, if pleasingly so. There’s a good chunk of crudity (but not much nudity outside of a really dumb dream sequence), the plots get too confusing after a while, and Patrick Renna’s (The Sandlot) Styles is such a tool that I couldn’t stand any of his scenes. But there’s a lot of laughs and likable characters that more than make up for these shortcomings.

Dorm Daze has the feel of a stage production, which makes sense because farces are the kind of thing that theater kids live to do. If you’re up for 90 minutes of hectic hilarity in a college setting, you really could do worse. I had a few good chuckles and breezed through this, which is more than I can say for almost anything National Lampoon slapped its label on after the year 2000.

Intermission!

• If you’re going to unicycle, wear a helmet
• Why would he have the word “virginity” on his whiteboard?
• The flipping Santa hats are cute but distracting
• Those little Polaroid insta-cameras that were all the rage back then!
• That rag is disgusting
• “He’s from France so don’t bother talking to him.” “Hola.”
• “We’re on to you, wife beater!”
• Oh man, don’t break the fourth wall like that
• First kisses come with a Gregorian chant
• Ugh another fourth wall break
• CUTE LITTLE TURTLES
• iMac spotted!
• “Surrounded by all you breeders really got me down.”
• Lots of casual assault happening here to this poor foreign exchange student
• So good to see Styles beaten
• “I can explain!”
• “One of the nice things about this university is that public beatings like this rarely happen.”
• He’s so happy to throw a smoke bomb, so happy
• A THIRD Dominique?