I wanted to like Dance of the Dead. Honestly I did. Come on, it’s a zombie movie with “of the dead” in the title and after Fido my hopes that people are going to do cool things with the gener has been restored in full faith even with giant hunks of crap the remake of Day actually getting made. But that’s beside the point, what I’m saying is that I went into it with hope. And that might have been where I went wrong. I have many friends who liked it so that’s what I had in my head when I started watching it.
If I’m watching a zombie movie and I need to refill my drink and I don’t bother to put the movie on pause, that’s a problem. If while watching it I start wondering if I’ve gotten any interesting emails, that’s a problem. If during the major ‘fight for their lives’ scenes I get distracted by 4chan, this is a problem. All of those happened. The thing is I just couldn’t get interested and everytime I tried I found myself more bored and annoyed then I had been previously.
I watched it last night, and after sleeping on it I think my biggest problem is that the zombie aspect of this movie is a widget. They could easily take the exact same script and change all the “zombie” references to “vampires” or “warewolves” or fucking “mummies” for that matter and it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. When you have a zombie walking around holding his decapitated head out so that he can lead his body in the right direction, it’s pretty clear you don’t give a crap about zombies and are just using a random default ghost movie device for your scene.
Maybe I’m being too much of a purist, which is saying a lot for someone who isn’t bothered by running zombies, but I think if this had been called High sGhoul Prom or Prom Bite and the monster of choice hadn’t been a zombie I would have at least been amused. But pulling of the Dead into your title I think at least puts some obligation on you to either try to add something to the genre or blatently ignore it and try to cash in and suffer the consequences of the fans. I don’t think this film did either, mostly I think they just didn’t get it.
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