Masters of Horror: Dance of the Dead

Cody Hamman looks at the third entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series, Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead.

As I have mentioned before, back with the horror anthology series Masters of Horror - which was created by Mick Garris and gave viewers the chance to watch an hour-long movie from a different iconic genre filmmaker every week - was airing on Showtime back in the early ‘00s, it seemed that horror fans, or at least the ones that frequented the message boards I would check, would primarily react negatively to each new installment. One I remember really getting eviscerated was the third one to air: Dance of the Dead, directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Eaten Alive, The Funhouse, Poltergeist, Lifeforce, I'm Dangerous Tonight, The Toolbox Murders remake, etc.) I was really disappointed to see the negative reaction to this one, because there was something about it that I found very appealing.

Based on a short story that Richard Matheson wrote for the anthology novel Star Science Fiction 3 in 1955, Dance of the Dead was scripted by Matheson’s son Richard Christian Matheson (Three O’Clock High, Loose Cannons, Full Eclipse, Big Driver), who had to flesh out the ideas presented in the story in a major way to turn it into something that could sustain an hour running time. In doing so, he also built up the characters and gave the story an emotional depth that wasn’t in the prose version.

The prose version had been set in the far-flung, post-World War III future of 1987. The Masters of Horror adaptation isn’t set that far ahead of when it made its way out into the world, but it is set in a post-World War III America that is still being ravaged by terrorist chemical attacks, called Blizz attacks. Jessica Lowndes stars as Peggy, a sheltered teenage girl who hasn’t seen much of the world outside of the diner owned by her mom Kate (Marilyn Norry), where she works as a waitress. But Peggy is no stranger to tragedy. She has lost her father, her older sister Anna has gone missing, and she has a horrific childhood memory of a Blizz attack disrupting a birthday party.

Sweet Peggy finds herself attracted to a boy from the wrong side of the tracks when criminal youths Jak (Jonathan Tucker) and Boxx (Ryan McDonald) come into the diner one day. Neither Jak nor Boxx are particularly good people; in their first scene, we watch them mug an elderly couple – and what they steal from them isn’t money. They withdraw a bag of blood from the younger of the two, then proceed to sell the blood to the lascivious M.C. (Robert Englund) at a nightclub called the Doom Room, which is located in a nightmare of a city called Muskeet. Why does the M.C. need blood? Well, it’s a special ingredient in the titular event, which is a major selling point at the Doom Room.

But while Boxx is a bit of a maniac, Jak is your classic “thug with a heart of gold”. He manages to sweet-talk Peggy into sneaking out of her home one night and accompanying him, Boxx, and Boxx’s girlfriend Celia (Lucie Guest) on a trip to Muskeet. A visit to the Doom Room. And what Peggy witnesses at the Doom Room shakes up her whole world.

Hooper brought a lot of energy and style to Dance of the Dead, employing visual editing tricks that are reminiscent of later Tony Scott movies. Those sort of visuals can sometimes be grating to me, but it seems appropriate for this material, since it takes place in a crumbling world gone mad and features characters that are getting wasted out of their minds. There really isn’t a whole lot to this story, even if there’s more going on in the Masters of Horror version than there was on the page. It just boils down to “boy meets girl, boy takes girl to a questionable club”... but there’s something about it that I find captivating.

A big part of my enjoyment comes from the dialogue. There are some great lines in this short movie, whether those lines are some of Boxx’s rambling nonsense (and just like Matheson in the original story, Boxx will occasionally give us helpful definitions of terms we’ve never heard before, since they were created during World War III). Sure, there are some cringe-inducing lines here and there as well, but I really like some of them. Like when Jak sneaks into the diner after hours through a restroom window that doesn’t latch properly. When Peggy finds him in the closed diner, she asks what he’s doing there and he answers, “Short-circuiting tragedy. The world has big teeth, eats girls like you for kicks if somebody’s not looking out for them.” I also enjoy the performances most of the actors give. Lowndes plays Peggy perfectly, McDonald is suitably off-kilter as Boxx, Englund is delightfully over-the-top. And Tucker manages to make Jak come off as likeable, despite his criminal tendencies. I was deeply annoyed by Tucker just two years earlier in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, but he made me like him in Dance of the Dead.

The Masters of Horror installments were filmed in Canada, and Dance of the Dead managed to re-use a vehicle that was used prominently in a very success horror movie that was filmed in the Vancouver area a couple years earlier: the airbrushed van from Freddy vs. Jason. Here, the van is used by a couple Doom Room employees who have some corpses to dump. And yes, the fact that the Freddy vs. Jason van shows up in a Tobe Hooper project that happens to have Freddy Krueger himself Robert Englund as a cast member does earn Dance of the Dead some bonus points from me.