Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper, 2005)

I'm not a big Tobe Hooper fan. To be honest, I prefer the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake to the original. Horror fan sin, I know, but the original is sort of boring. Anyway, I wasn't expecting that much from Hooper's Masters of Horror episode Dance of the Dead, and I was right. The hour-long show at the same time feels like ten minutes and three hours, as nothing really happens. Based on a short story by Richard Matheson (who wrote the teleplay), Dance tells of a post-apocalyptic United States, mostly represented by a club who's main attraction is, well, the dance of the dead. Robert Englund does a great job being appropriately creepy as the club's MC, but the dance of the dead itself is obscured by camera angles, and not particularly impressive. The camera tricks are my main problem with this episode in general; it's like someone just realized all these cool things their camera could do, but instead, it's incredibly distracting and pointless. The scene with the four kids in the car goes on way longer than it needs to, and is so visually overwrought that it's hard to watch. Alongside the overdone effects, the plot is paper-thin, so much so that I won't even go into it here, for fear of "spoiling" something. Nothing really happens, and when it does, you can see it coming a mile away. I'm a Masters of Horror completist, but I wouldn't recommend Dance of the Dead for anyone except the other completists in the world. 4/10

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