Lucio Fulci is a usually very remarkable director who moves with the times, that's for sure. Following the huge success of stupid dancing movies, like "Fame" and "Flashdance", it was an inexplicably popular trend in the early 1980's to insert overlong dancing sequences in horror films as well. Fulci was one of the first foreign filmmakers to cash in on this trend; moreover, he dedicated a FULL movie to the intrigues and competition issues in typical dance academies! The saddening result is a tame and boring movie, very much UN-Fulci and definitely not worth being listed among his other contemporary gore-highlights like "The Beyond", "New York Ripper" and "House by the Cemetery". Someone is killing off the pretty but very competitive girls of one and the same dancing class, only a couple weeks prior to an important recital. Her/his modus operandi is a lot gentler than usual in slashers, since the victims get paralyzed first and then stabbed in the heart with a hatpin. It's truly incomprehensible why Lucio Fulci, commonly known as the Godfather of Gore, decided to make the murders so soft & bloodless, sometimes even happening entirely off-screen! What happened to my horror-idol with his normal passion for nastily cut throats or vile eyeball-stabbings? Perhaps Fulci hoped to reach wider audiences like this or maybe his producers wanted to see a stylish murder-mystery for a change. The hunt for the killer's identity starts off interesting but, due to the repetitive and way too expanded dancing sequences, you stop caring about that pretty soon as well. Italian horror regular Ray Lovelock ("Autopsy", "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie") gives an adequate performance and most of the academy girls are lovely eye-candy (showing a bit of flesh, too), but it constantly remains a dire film.
Review of Murder-Rock: Dancing Death
