(2005) ***
Post WWIII society where the world is full of poverty and crime. Peggy lives a sheltered life with her overbearing mother. They run a small diner on the outskirts of Muskeet, the nasty dirty city. Four young people come into the diner one night, obviously city youth. One of the boys catches Peggy’s eye.
He introduces himself as Jak and tells her to meet him at midnight if she’d like to see him. She sneaks out of the house and takes off for a wild night of drugs and partying with Jak and his friends Boxx and Celia. They wind up in Muskeet at a club called the Doom Room. This club features a special act called the dance of the dead. The club M.C., injects corpses with a fluid that reanimates them and they are poked with cattle prods and made to dance. Peggy is shocked when she recognizes one of the dancers as her sister.
Again, I have to give this a mediocre rating. It was good but nothing so special that I would call it great. Like JSP and JPX I give a little extra here for the fact that they only have an hour to make it work. I do like this series but I think the name alone, Master’s of Horror, gives us a greater expectation of what’s to come. This episode was very confusing for the first half, you’re not quite sure what’s going on but it does all come together eventually. Maybe the biggest problem is that most of the stories feel like they are ended too abruptly. Again, that’s the one hour confinement issue. Even so, they are worth checking out.
4 comments:
Yeah these MOH are a total mixed bag. I haven't seen this one either. I encourage you to check out Cigarette Burns by John Carpenter - I think he makes the most of the small budget. Nice review though.
wow, funny coincidence: i've been reading "i am legend" which is in an anthology of richard matheson stories and just last night, i read "dance of the dead" and thought it was kind of lame, but mostly because of all the slang the kids were using.
(now that i think of it, i found "the dark knight returns" annoying for the same reason)
but the funniest part is that one of the short stories turned out to be the ZUNI WARRIOR STORY! the film version is pretty faithful to the original. and if i weren't chuckling throughout the story thinking of the zuni warrior's hamburglar voice and moldy wooden torso, i'd have thought "shit, this is scary."
Yeah, Matheson is awesome! He wrote Little Girl Lost and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, which were both filmed for the Twilight Zone. He also wrote A Stir of Echoes.
Robert Englund annoys me.
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