Dance of the Dead (2005)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Wonderfully offbeat film!

To me, this movie is perfection.

One of the best films i have seen

In the post apocalyptic world, youth become malcontents and spend their time at an underground club, The Doom Room run by Robert Englund. The malcontents make money by involuntarily taking blood from people and selling it to Englund. Jessica Lowndes plays the young virginal waitress who has been able to live a sheltered life away from all of the obscenity of the world. Of course Jessica, in her teen curiosity hooks up with some malcontents and gets taken to the perverse Doom Room whose claim to fame is....Great movie for horror/zombie fans. Cult classic.F-bomb, nudity (not Jessica), sex.

Looking forward for the combination of director Tobe Hooper and Robert Englund it failed a bit. Not that Englund was bad, he dis a great job but the story was a bit weak and the way it was filmed annoyed me after a while. All those shaky shots and picture over picture didn't do this episode well. Not only that, there's not that much for horror buffs to find, there's no red stuff let even say gore to spot and the way the dead danced was a bit ridiculous. The acting itself was above mediocre and Jessica Lowndes (Peggy) as a newcomer did very well. But the end was predictable too. It sometimes looked a bit like a mess in the 'Doom Room'. Was it the way it was directed or filmed I can't tell. Not my favourite Dance Of The Dead and to be honest it was a bit remade again with Robert Englund in another turkey, Zombie Strippers (2008).Gore 1/5 Nudity 1,5/5 Effects 1,5/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5

Here we go with another episode of Season 1, this time the number 3 and the volume 11 of the Region 4 DVDs, Dance of the Dead. As you know, Tobe Hooper directed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist and this time he gives us a decent episode but unfortunately nothing more.The story takes place after the World War III and we have in Peggy (Jessica Lowndes) our protagonist. We know since the beginning that she, and her mother Kate (Marilyn Norry), is still suffering the dead of both her father and her sister but also both suffers the consequences of Blizz. Unfortunately the story focuses more in the typical relation between a teenage and his/her parents so with Peggy's new friends she is going to experience new things and is very conventional this part of the episode since it is just the classic awake of a teenage going against the authority and wanting to have new "experiences". The bar where the new "friends" of Peggy hang out has its main show in the dance of the dead and has in The M.C. (cool performance of Robert Fred Krueger Englund) its leader. Of course all of this are kind of the reflection of that post-war time and of course the best thing of this episode is its final part when you realize about the new "job" of Peggy's sister and why she has that "job". When you realize about the real story of Kate with her other daughter Anna, you will think something like "damn this episode could have been much better with the same basic story" and in the end, what dance?Then and finally, Tobe Hooper's first contribution to Masters of Horror is good to see just once but is also the weakest episode of the ones that I have seen that are only 6 (all from Season 1).

While 'Dance of the Dead' isn't my favorite Masters of Horror episode, it's still a pretty good entry. If you're expecting conventional-horror, look-elsewhere, this is about a horror that is internal. Peggy (played wonderfully by Jessica Lowndes) is a young-girl living in the contaminated-ruins of the United States, in Michigan. She and her mother run a diner in what is left of their community, while the streets are populated with the sick, dying, and gangs of youths willing to do anything to survive. Utilities still exist, and there is food, but the social environment is every-man-for-himself, a situation very close to complete anarchy.Everyone in the film is dying-slowly from a terrorist-attack of a chemical weapon known as 'blitz', especially those who have been exposed-directly. In Richard Matheson's original-story, 'blitz' is exploded in the stratosphere, creating a huge corona-cloud that rains a skin-eating snow on its victims. Most of the victims have the look of lepers. One day, a gang of young 'blood-runners' comes into the diner led by a guy named Jak, and Peggy goes with them to the shunned city of 'Muskeet', where the dance of the dead is the main-event for nihilist-survivors and criminals. According to the MC of the club (Robert Englund, in a show-stealing performance), the military found that certain chemical-warfare agents would reanimate dead-troops to keep them fighting. One of the main-ingredients for this process is blood. Peggy's mother has warned her about the town ('It should be burned to-the-ground.'), with an odd-turn. She's hiding-something, like the fate of her other-daughter who...you'll have to watch the episode.In this bleak-future that could happen tomorrow, Tobe Hooper shows us where America is psychologically, and where it could end-up. I've actually talked to people in their twenties about this entry, and none of them could tell me why they didn't like it. I can tell you why--it paints-a-picture of youth that isn't flattering, and it makes a few comments on the counterculture (as a dead-end expression) that aren't either. We aren't really very far as a culture from the 'dance of the dead' strip-shows, not-at-all. America has become-addicted to a form of sexualized-violence in our culture, and it's a violence that is senseless and without any motivation behind-it, or meaning. Some would call this conditioning.37-years-ago, director Sam Peckinpah tried to change this with 'The Wild Bunch', by showing-us violence for what it really was and, for-a-time, it worked. With his machine-gun editing (taken-up by Hooper here, the hour-episode has1,100-cuts), and his graphic-depictions of people dying in slow-motion, Peckinpah tried to make people sick. By the 1980s, this style had been copied ad-infinitum without any depictions of the consequences of violence. Ironically, showing these consequences is more visually-graphic, and usually earn a 'hard-R', 'X', or an NC-17 rating for a movie. So, by the 1980s, Peckinpah had been trumped by Hollywood. Today, it's even-worse.Hooper (and both Matheson-scribes) shoves this fact in our collective-face, and he does it with a barrage of imagery that is pretty-ugly. You could take-away the setting of a post-apocalypse America, and you could still tell this story in the present about an overprotected 16-year-old girl who loses her innocence. This overprotection is crucial, and Matheson setting the story in the American Midwest is strongly-symbolic. This is the real story of 'Dance of the Dead', and it rankles the wounded-idealist in all of us. But again, he's also telling us that we are jaded, bored and dehumanized, another reason some viewers were angered by the piece.Sadly, most of the bad-reviews of this film only prove-its-point: we have become desenitized and dehumanized as a culture. Through the use of deep-colors, incredible-composition, and an editing-style that can only be called a barrage, Hooper has a great work here. Also, most of the gore here is pretty grim, and I expect a certain level of it in most horror-films. It's my own humble-opinion that the worst horror-fans are gorehounds, but even-worse is the film-buff who expects Orson Welles to do Citizen Kane over-and-over again (you could argue he did). This is a great addition to Tobe Hooper's canon, even an exceptional one. I think the main-problem people had with this film was the editing--it never lets you rest, and that's good. What a heavy metal Weimar Republic-nightmare he has crafted, it's stunning and real. We're all denizens of the Doom Room.09/28/2006: Bwahahahahahah!http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/