Dance Of The Dead Movie Review (2008)

Gather round all ye who love ZOMBIES, BRAINS, GUTS AND GORE!!!! It also wouldn’t hurt if you appreciate teen comedies with age-appropriate actors to match. Yes, today we’re speaking about the 2008 film Dance of The Dead. Before we dive in, let me mention another film that reminds me of this one – Return of The Living Dead. I can’t help myself; I seriously catch the same feelings while watching this film as I did/do with ROTLD. It could be the comedy, it could be my love of one liners and youthful naivety, nevertheless, you can put both movies next to each other and they measure up nicely. The character evolution and creativity effects wise is similar for sure. Now we all know that ROTLD had a big budget, but that was in the 80’s, which doesn’t mean much today since the evolution of movie making has came so far. Given that Dance of The Dead was an Indy film, the budget value was probably the same as it was for ROTLD in the 80’s. Both films rely heavily on great acting, delivery and dialogue which is the way it should be. I’m not a huge fan of CGI or many of today’s Horror movies as is, they rely too much on shock value, torture and the gore aspect. There are also several moments in Dance of the Dead where I’m reminded of another Horror favorite, Night of The Creeps! That’s an entirely different conversation for another time and hopefully between myself or TJ, one of us will get to that one.

Dance of the Dead comes to us from Sam Raimi’s Distro deal/partnership with Ghost House Underground. And let’s be thankful for that, otherwise we might not have been able to see this film at all! Sadly, the film never did see a worldwide release in theaters, but it did get the SXSW treatment, and it was shown at the Atlanta Film Festival. While the movie was lauded and got rave reviews, it still didn’t get the go ahead for a theatrical release. Of course, I wasn’t cool enough to get an invite to the showing at the Atlanta Film Festival – maybe next time.

As mentioned earlier DOTD is a teen comedy that centers around a few High Schoolers – the preps, the geeks and the rockers. The preppy kids are anticipating some good times at their upcoming Prom, the geeks are indifferent and more worried about their Sci-fi club and the rockers are pissed because the school wouldn’t let their band play the Prom. The bulk of the characters in the movie didn’t have dates to the Prom anyway, so it’s up to them to save the town, themselves and everyone else. Much like any other zombie film you’ve seen, it doesn’t take long before the carnage starts with little rhyme, reason or background story. The only thing mentioned is the Nuclear Plant in town and every now and then throughout the film it’ll get another mention as the possible culprit. Once the carnage and brain eating starts, it’s a thrill ride and all you can do is strap in and enjoy! As mentioned earlier, the actors/actresses are age appropriate which adds a sincere amount of credibility to the story. Jimmy and his girl Lindsey are on the outs, so they break up and she decides to go to the Prom with Mitch… Mitch does the unimaginable and takes Lindsey to the Graveyard for some backseat loving before the Prom but much to his dismay he gets snatched out of the car right before he can seal the deal. Meanwhile on the other side of town Jimmy is delivering Pizza to a family who’s already been infected, and they do their best to eat him. Ultimately, it doesn’t take Jimmy and Lindsey long to find each other and come with a plan to rid the town of the zombies and of course go to the Prom as they’re both still in their Prom clothes… Naturally, the PROM is where the bulk of the kids in town are and what do Zombies want, BRAINS and lots of them!! By the time the kids get to the Prom is overrun with brain eating cannibals looking for more BRAINS!!! So, they have to come up with a plan and fast!
 
I’ll leave you with that, the rest you can watch for yourself. On paper this film shouldn’t be this much fun, but holy shit it is! It’s short on CGI, there’s a ton of incredible old school make up effects and good ole blood splatter, gore, guts and close ups of faces being torn off. It also bares mentioning that for a “B” movie, this movie is well shot and while it was made in 2008, the colors, movement and saturation of the film still hold up – it was well shot and made with care and respect for the craft – it’s not shot like an amateur porn. At times it looks like it was shot on a huge budget. If I had one gripe it would be that the DVD doesn’t hold up well on my monstrosity of a TV, but it does well on a 50” screen. I’m sure if they would give it the 1080p 4k Blu-ray treatment it would jump off the screen. I’d love to see that; I’d pre-order it today!!! The film locale was shot about 2 hours up the road from where I live in Rome, Ga. According to the extras on the film, a great deal of the town were extras in the movie and helped the film crew out at every turn. As a Georgian it warmed the cackles of my heart to hear this, it shows that not everyone in this area is a bible waving, gun toting hillbilly! If you see this flick out and about or on one of your streaming channels, don’t cheat yourself, dig in and look out for the kid who gets his tongue bitten out of his head and loves every minute of it! To borrow a line from another favorite Horror film about the Prom – “It’s not who you go with honey, it’s who takes you home”!