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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 24.72%
Worth A Look: 23.6%
Average: 35.96%
Pretty Bad: 5.62%
Total Crap: 10.11%
5 reviews, 59 user ratings
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| Dead Man on Campus |
by Chris Parry
"Walked the line between good and evil, but fell the wrong way."
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Man oh man, did I want to hate this movie. I was all prepared to give it a big ol' serve for being substandard, derivative, formulaic and generally a load of old shite. I wanted to hate this film even more than Urban Legend (which deserves undying hatred), but I just couldn't do it.This MTV Production stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zack from Saved By The Bell - there's reason enough to hate a project), Tom Everett Scott (who was involved in the worst sequel of 98 - American Werewolf In Paris), Lochlyn Munro (from Night At The Roxbury - ew), the English lesbian from Party Of Five, a chick from Buffy and another from Family Matters, and an Australian sitcom actor putting on the worst English accent ever heard in a Cineplex.
Looks pretty shitty thus far, right? When you add the story to the mix it looks worse. Two failing college pudwhackers decide the only way they can get a pass is to find a suicidal roommate, push him to suicide and then get automatic A's courtesy of an obscure college law called "The Deadman's Clause".
So okay, you've got a member of every bad sitcom on television, acting in what looks like the prequel to Weekend At Bernie's, produced by the worst TV network in the world today.
So how the hell did I actually enjoy the first half of this movie? It's improbable. It's impossible! It couldn't happen.
It did.
There's actually a fair amount of decent humor in the first half of this film. Nearly enough to carry it through. Zack is funny! Not guffaw funny, and not consistently funny, but funny enough to make you forget all about that annoying hack opposite him, Tom Everett Scott, a non-actor with a great agent. But Zack covers Tom's fluffs and has, surprisingly, very surprisingly, enough comedy timing to make it all work.
Work, that is, until the story just gets way too out of hand for even the best comedian to make it workable. The introduction of bizarre suicidals into the picture should and could have been an opportunity for things to get hilarious. What they got, instead, was cheap and loud and bad.
Suspension of disbelief always has to be a factor in college giggle films, but there comes a point where the line has been crossed and the director knows it, and instead of backtracking they get 'outrageous'... it never works and it ruins any chance you have of coming out of Dead Man On Campus with a smile on your dial.What could have been fresh and fun turns out to be a festival of cheap sight gags and lost plots, but if only for the halfway-decent first half hour and Zack not completely shaming himself, this film gets three stars.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=21&reviewer=1
originally posted: 02/02/99 11:02:13
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USA
21-Aug-1998 (R)
DVD: 24-Jun-2003
UK
N/A
Australia
04-Mar-1999 (M)
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