A spoof of dance movies, even though I think
the movie 'Dance Flick' was a spoof of dance movies but 'Dance
Flick' didn't bring to the table what this spoof, 'Freak
Dance' brings to the table. These table bringings
turning out to be a full blown musical. They don't sing
all the time in 'Freak Dance' just most of the time, and the
songs are really, really stupid. Just like the movie is
really, really stupid. And for the most part a lot of
this stupidity is really funny. For the most part.
Cocolinia (Megan Heyn) is rich bitch who longs to dance.
Personally, I wouldn't have called her a bitch because I find
that term offensive, but that's what they call her in this
movie. Her mom (Amy Poehler - arguably the funniest
woman alive) doesn't want her to dance but when a rich bitch
wants to dance, she's gonna dance.
Eventually she meets the Fantaseez crew and in its defacto
leader Funky Bunch (Michael Daniel Cassady), a light skinned
Black man raised in the streets. Even though he looks
like a white guy wearing a headband that was raised in The
Valley, but I'm no genealogist so what would I know?
Actually Funky Bunch is only substituting as a the leader
since the normal head of the crew, Asteroid Asteroid (Hal
Rudnick), known for his signature move of Dancing on the
Ceiling… the worst song Lionel Ritchie ever made… is on deaths
door ever since he tried to do the Freak Dance boogaloo during
a dance off. The Freak Dance boogaloo should not be
confused with the Electric Boogaloo which is another beast
altogether. Anyway, if you don't do the Freak Dance
Boogaloo properly it will shave off your penis and make your
head implode. There are other members of the crew
such as Barrio (Sam Riegel) whose Hispanic in case you
couldn't figure that out, Egghead (Benjamin Siemon) whose
smart and the extremely limber and profane Sassy (Angela
Timbur) who can't read. Who knew illiteracy could be so
funny?
If you've seen a dance movie or two before,
it's not uncommon for The Man to turn up and crush the dreams
of the dancers by closing down their operations, usually
because they need the spot to build some mega structure in a
crap neighborhood, but here The Man (director Matt Bessar)
shuts them down, in song, for some lousy code violations
leaving the Fantaseez crew in a desperate need of a few grand
to keep the dream alive, whatever the hell that dream happens
to be because we don't know. It's also not uncommon to
have an evil dance crew, such as the Dazzle Crew, led by the
sexually suspect Dazzle (Drew Droege) show up to further
complicate issues, as these evil dancers have twisted the art
of dance into something… sexual. Not cool.
Also, if you've seen a dance movie or two it usually comes
down to a dance off between the two warring crews, which is
also going to happen, but the dance off between Dazzle and
Fataseez… well… it's something else.
We're kind and gentle people here at the FCU, rarely lobbing
insults and diatribes at the hardworking people, folks we
don't personally know, who make these movies. Sadly, the
spoof movie genre has tested even our angelic approach to
these things and seems to be on the downslide… and you
probably know why Cough… Seltzer… Cough… Friedberg… not that we're picking
on anybody or anything. Well we are happy to say while
'Freak Dance' doesn't save the spoof genre… which can't happen
until those two cats stop making spoof movies… it does briefly
move it out of the hospice and into the ICU. The story
being told is negligible, heck I've already forgotten what is
was about, something to do with terrorist I think, but the
movie is funny. Sometimes side-splittingly so… sometimes
not at all despite the best efforts of all involved… but with
scenes such as the slaughterhouse love song, the ode to the
evils of marijuana, and lots of other little nuggets,
vignettes and tidbits littered throughout the somewhat lengthy
running time of 'Freak Dance', it's funny outweighs it's
non-funny.
I'm thinking one of the things that helps a spoof movie is
paying a healthy respect to what one is attempting to spoof in
addition to having a good understanding of the spoofed
genre. Clearly professional dancers, singers and
songwriters were involved in making this controlled nonsense,
so the dancing and singing were taken pretty seriously with
the humor allowed to flow out of the dancing and the singing…
organically… as opposed to just
being stuck laughing at bad singing and bad dancing, which
would've gotten old pretty quick. Also future spoof
movie makers might want to avoid cryptic pop culture
references which people won't understand in five years and
thus it won't be funny anymore. And that's assuming it
was funny today, which it probably wasn't. That doesn't
happen in this movie but we're just throwing it out there in
case some filmmaker somewhere is gearing up to make another
spoof movie, say like spoofing 'The Hunger Games' or
something. Because spoofing The Hunger Games in which
kids brutally slaughter each other would be freaking
hilarious, right? But I don't think anybody would do
that, would they?
Anyway, 'Freak Dance' does have its challenges as more than
once it gets a little too stupid for its own good, but
nonetheless it made me laugh. And considering this is a
movie that has billed itself a comedy, what more could one ask
for?
