We decided to keep cracking away at those Masters of Horror episodes up on Hulu, so naturally ZRC-related curiosity led to the third episode from the first season, Dance of the Dead.

Dance of the Dead concerns a young woman named Peggy working in a diner sometime in the near future. The United States has been devastated by bioterrorism… somehow or other.. and much of it is ruin. Still, things go on, and people need food, so, diners. Peggy’s overbearing and thoroughly unpleasant mother is the center of her world; the rest of their family died in one of these bioterror attacks, which rained from the sky like acid rain and burned people to death, or else left them grotesquely mutilated.

Peggy is about to have a run-in with some punks who literally shake down old people for their blood, though why they do so isn’t immediately clear. They hail from the neighboring town of Muskeet, which Peggy’s mother hates (not without reason, I mean, it’s home to blood pirates). These two come into Peggy’s diner with a couple of skanks, and the quiet, brooding young man of the pair strikes up a romance with her, and convinces her to go on a trip to see the world, sort of.

The world here being, well, Muskeet, and in particular a club called The Doom Room where they have a very unique live performance act.. involving the Undead.

Yeah. Not to mince words here, but what they do is shoot up corpses with a mixture of blood and some biowarfare chemical, making them into spasming Zombies, then parade them on stage and hit them with cattle prods to make them ‘dance’.

I’m seriously not joking.

There’s some stuff in there about Peggy and her mom and dark secrets from their past, blah blah blah. Who cares, honestly? Robert Englund is here as the MC of the Doom Room, and he does a pretty good job holding down the smarmy villainy angle, but…

Cattle prods. Yeah.

This is one of the absolute most offensive and despicable things I’ve ever seen on my screen. I think even George Romero has more sympathy for Zombies than to electro-torture them, even fictionally, and call it ‘entertainment’. This crosses about six different lines and all for no good reason.

I highly recommend avoiding it. Just.. go read a book. Plant some flowers. Give a small child some ice cream, perhaps a Zombie child if one’s handy.

Just avoid ‘Dance of the Dead’. Seriously.

Dance of the Dead qualifies for a Living Supremacist ranking so easily it’s stunning.

Dance of the Dead is available for free on Hulu, if for some reason you choose to ignore our warnings and see it for yourself.

Tags: Television, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, December 25th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.