Dance of the Dead: For those who thought "Return of the Living Dead" was too cheesy

Those Red Box DVD kiosks outside grocery stores and truck stops have to do better when describing their offerings. I cannot remember them mentioning that Ghost House Underground’s "Dance of the Dead" was a comedy, and with so many clever gimmick zombie flicks dropping the ball in terms of capitalizing on the humor of the walking dead (on a plane, in a prison, in a mall circa 2004, etc.), it is important to tell potential viewers that someone has released a refined version of the original "Return of the Living Dead". No, Dance does not have the neon red pubic hair of the cult classic, but it makes up for that by doing everything else the RotLD better.

It seems like it should be common sense not to build a nuclear power plant next to a cemetery, but in a predominantly white community where the son of the police chief is an aspiring backyard wrestler, this idea’s downside can be overlooked. The cemetery’s custodian has been able to keep the reanimated corpse problem under wraps, but one night the high school’s science fiction club just has to give their P.K.E. meter a try, and the recently departed decide that they have to take some kind of action against these meddling kids.

Not content with just terrorizing the geeks, and unable to ignore their hunger, the undead decide to treat the town as a buffet, and the local high school’s prom is the dessert table. Now it is up to a slacker, a cheerleader, the class vice president, the yarder and the nerds to take their town back, and prevent too many memorial pages from taking up space in the yearbook.

Dance of the Dead is a pretty down to Earth zombie feature. The story is very linear, so no one will get lost, and the characters are of the same archetypes that the audience cheered for in the John Hughes and "American Pie" eras of high school comedies. Nothing about the movie is very foreign or intellectually deep, and comes across as more of a PG-13 comic book movie than a horror film. Thankfully, the messiness that comes along with zombies prevents the film from taking itself too seriously and more importantly tiresome.

There is not much depth to the characters, and since this film is not trying to present a message about society (I think we have all grown past the nuclear scare nonsense that Mr. Burns is the mascot for), there does not need to be. If there was, this film would drag along and forget about the necessities of a zombie comedy. A gut-busting scene that is too intense for R rated zombie dramas, heroes who have fun dispatching the flesh eaters, gore that is reminiscent to the 80's movies, and hot zombie-on-zombie action. If there is any problem with the story, it is that the characters seem callous at times because they do not take much time to mourn, but that would waste time in a 95 minute film that is determined to never slow down.

Dance of the Dead is one of those great scripts that just needed to be shot. As long as the effort put behind the gore and the actors just care enough, it should be entertaining. Perhaps if it had a great director and budget behind it, it would have the potential to be as fun as "Zombieland", but then it may have also lost the charm of being an excellent B-Movie in an overly A-Movie world.

hellhorror.com