Dance Macabre Reviews

Originally intended as a sequel to the Robert Englund version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, DANCE MACABRE is based on a cinematic ruse so transparent, obvious and cliched it boggles the mind. The result is a misbegotten mix of PSYCHO, SUSPIRIA and co-executive producer Harry Alan Towers's beloved TEN LITTLE INDIANS theme. Anthony Wagner (Englund) runs a ballet academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a woman known as "The Madame" who's supposedly Wagner's old love Svetlana, confined to a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident. (Unfortunately for viewers, from the moment she first appears onscreen, it's glaringly clear that "The Madame" is actually Englund in pasty makeup and a wig, and all the scenes of Wagner having "conversations" with her in an upstairs room don't hide the dual-identity trick one bit.) Wagner takes a special interest in accepting a reluctant American student named Jessica (Michelle Zeitlin) when he sees that she bears a striking resemblance to the young Svetlana. Once Jessica begins her dance training, the other girls start falling victim to a mysterious killer. First, Jessica's roommate Claudine (Nina Goldman) is drowned in the academy's hot tub; then Angela (Julene Renee) is hanged at the St. Petersburg Ballet, where the troupe has gone for a special class. The Madame explains the disappearances by telling the other girls that their friends have returned home suddenly, and lets them out for a night at a nearby club to relax (and allow for some gratuitous rock 'n' roll sequences). While Jessica continues a developing romance with a local photographer named Alex (Alexander Sergeyev), another student, Natasha (Natasha Fesson), is thrown in front of a moving subway train. When a fourth death occurs--Ingrid (Marianna Moen), who has recently kicked a drug habit, is tossed from a window to her death, which is explained to the girls as a suicide--the other students finally get the idea that sticking around may not be a good idea and withdraw from the academy. Wagner convinces Jessica to stay for one-on-one training with him, and soon she discovers what the audience has figured out from the start: Wagner and The Madame are one and the same, and the real Svetlana is a corpse sitting in an upstairs room. After a confrontation that results in the deaths of both Alex and Wagner's assistant Olga (Irina Davidoff), Wagner, who killed the others to eliminate Jessica's competition, forces her to continue her sessions with him. But when she goes for her audition before the St. Petersburg Ballet, Jessica refuses to play "Svetlana" for Wagner, leading him to jump, in a fit of mania, off a balcony to his death. It's hard to decide which aspect of DANCE MACABRE is more idiotic: the girls, who never cotton to the resemblance between Wagner and The Madame and take a while to find the string of disappearances and "accidents" strange, or the screenplay, which asks the audience to accept this foolishness at face value. Writer-director Greydon Clark tries to fudge the issue by having Wagner, Alex, The Madame and Olga make themselves scarce just before each murder, but anyone with any familiarity with the genre will see through all this right away. It's almost a subsidiary point that none of the murders themselves are the least bit scary, and that Jessica is too utterly vapid to engender any sympathy at all. How can one be scared for a girl who, after all her friends have left due to the strange events, easily accepts Wagner's invitation to stick around when she never wanted to attend the school in the first place? The Russian settings are pretty but used only for travelogue value, and the movie throws in exploitation elements as if programmed by a computer: MTV club scene here, gratuitous sex scene there. Considering that veteran director Clark (SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS, JOYSTICKS) and producer Menahem Golan were also responsible for 1990's THE FORBIDDEN DANCE, this film's only virtue is that, when Jessica proclaims she wants to abandon ballet for her "own style" of dancing, she isn't later seen doing the lambada. (Violence, substance abuse, nudity, sexual situations.)