Masters Of Horror - "Dance Of The Dead"

danceofthedeadrating-0.5Easily the weakest MOH episode ever to see air, "Dance Of The Dead" is every horror fan's worst nightmare: a soulless, pointless teleplay worst-case-scenario. Its incompetence only underscores the sheer dullness and stupidity of the whole affair.

In this instance, our blame seems to lie upon the shoulders of Tobe Hooper, a director I've always found to be vastly overrated. (As a hater of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and having seen The Mangler and Toolbox Murders, I've yet to forgive the man for his incompetence. Sadly Massacre was his peak and it was a flash-in-the pan waste of time.) But, aside from my deep dislike for Tobe Hooper, a good part of the blame should be heaped upon Richard Christian "Chris" Matheson, son of "I Am Legend" writer Richard Matheson, pumping out a shitty adaptation of his father's obviously shitty story.

I'm not going to try to decipher the post-apocalyptic drivel that they passed off on me as a story, so I'll leave it at this: something happened and now you've got a weird retro future where young punks roam around drinking and drugging, just like now, except there's a lot fewer people. Amidst all this, you've got a club run by Robert Englund, overacting and chewing more scenery than he's ever chewed before in his life. Imagine Freddy combined with every other role he's had since and you still don't have the level of bad overacting that he provides in this storm of ass. At this club, the severly overwrought Freddy provides patrons with the opportunity to watch zombies "dance" on the stage via electrocution. Yeah, it's actually dumber than it sounds.

I'll gloss over the entire plot and the poor, foolish young actors involved. I'm not sure how much I can blame them when the rest of this retread mongoloid garbage is so stylistically fucked and lobotimized. Some people would claim that there's meaning in this episode (iMDB, I'm looking at you), but there's nothing here except a shitty titties 'n' zombies extravaganza, more inclined to let people chew scenery and deliver dialogue about nothing than actually have them doing anything that makes the slightest bit of sense or would entertain any viewer at all.

Somehow, the monstrous stupidity of this vapid horseshit manages to drive the show down to a level beneath some of the worse movies I've seen in my time... It's too bad to even be funny. It's just an irritating nightmare and you can't wait for it to reach its wretched conclusion. One would not think that such a lack of enjoyability, good taste, or substance would be manageable, but these men made it happen.

The fact that the Matheson/Hooper episode, "The Damned Thing", in the second season was so tolerable was an experience filled with shock and awe for me, as I had given up hope that either of these men could create anything watchable by a human being ever again. So I guess I have to give them that...

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