Zachary FenellSaturday Boners: Dance of the Dead
January 17th 2009 18:58
Dance of the Dead, 2005
To go with our developing "themed days", I decided to give you a little something crazy on Saturdays - total boners. Now, before you go thinking that I've taken to reviewing pr0n, don't get your panties in a twist: I've always thought of "boner" as being a ridiculously stupid mistake, often unintentionally funny.... and only much later was it that other thing.
You may remember the name Tobe Hooper as the director from other amazing boners such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. He wrote the former as well, and that kinda tells you where this is going. If you've seen more than a few of his pieces, you know that his Achilles heel is character development. The biggest problem you will find with any movie he writes or directs is locating your Give-A-Damn.
Let's just side-step that for a brief second. Even before the improbable and unsympathetic characterizations of Dance of the Dead from the Masters of Horror series (and what the heck is that guy doing with his eyeliner??!), the story starts off with a flaky yet vaguely interesting premise. There's some kind of radioactive fallout that eats people... okay, we got that. And now this post-apocalyptic world uses a declassified military drug to turn dead people into animated corpses. Okay... but... why do they have to dress it up as "science" to justify showing these animated corpses if they're in a government-failed dystopian thug-run backwater town? If you're going to go out of your way to mention that your motivation for doing something is THIS, you might want to justify it, even if it's just with another off-hand comment.
If you leave aside the stupid drug-trip scene and the impossibly perfect lip-gloss (I swear to god, it was so shiny and perfect and out of place that it was painfully distracting) and even avoid Robert Englund (who was his normal awesomely creepy self and literally the absolute best part of this movie), the story wasn't that bad. The ending was twisted and had potential. The ham-handed "I've Got A Moral HERE!" overtone was too much, though.
After watching this a few other Hooper "classics", I seriously wonder if he as a person doesn't have some kind of personality disorder that gives him a kind of inverse empathy. Any character he presents is flat and difficult to care about, and if you don't care about the characters, you don't care what happens to them, and then you have no reason to tell your story in the first place.
Not all boners will be 1-star shots, but this one is. With a run-time of 59 minutes, if you try to sit through this, you'll want those two hours back.
1 star
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