Dance, Dance, Revulsion

Hidey-ho, horror movie fans! Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

This week’s horror movie comes from another pretty messed up individual that loves to make movies that wipe their proverbial feet on your nice, clean soul. Yes, I’m talking about you, Gaspar Noe. Now, I’m not going to put down the directors that work that way, mainly because a part of me enjoys having my cold, dead heart kicked around like a football from time to time.

Call me a masochist (shrug). But when we’re talking horror, I kind of feel like movies like this don’t really fall into a “horror” category, per se, in that most horror movies follow a particular design. Lure, stabby-stab, repeat, basically.

So, I have no real quarrel with movies like that as such...but they can be a hard watch they get mired down in the art instead of getting to the stabby-stab already.

Case in point:





Climax starring Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillmeric, Souhaila Yacoub, Kiddy Smile, Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull, Gizelle Palmer, Taylor Kastle, Thea Carla Schott, Sharleen Temple, Lea Vlamos, Alaia Alsafir, Kendall Mugler, Lakdhar Dridi, Adrien Sissoko, Mamadou Bathily...and at least 5-10 other people. It’s a ridiculously large cast.

All right, so the movie begins with video interviews of members of a dance troupe. Now, one might think for the sake of pacing that we’re only going to see about a quarter of those interviews - you know, focus on whoever the main characters are instead of looking at everybody. Nope. Sorry. We’re looking at everybody. That’s about 24 interviews we’re watching. The whole thing takes about 12 minutes of the movie.

So, next, the dancers are all rehearsing at a party they're having in a big warehouse and yes, we are treated to a very sexy 5-minute dance number.





After the dance number, we take another 10-ish bunch of minutes listening to the dancer conversations which consist mostly of gossiping about the other dancers...and a rather disturbing conversation from two of the dancers talking about beating up one of the other dancers.

Yeah, so, we’re about a half-hour in at this point and it’s time for another dance sequence. After the dance sequence, we’re flashing names on the screen of the actors and actresses and various other artists.

Alright, so we’re coming up on the first hour of the movie and the party is winding down. Our main character, Selva (Boutella) starts to notice that she’s feeling kind of strange. Alarms go off when Psyche (Schott) stops in the middle of the dance floor and starts peeing in the middle of the dance floor like Regan in the Exorcist.

Selva deduces that the sangria they’d all been drinking has been spiked with something. She goes to their manager Emmanuelle (Gajan-Maull) and accuses her of spiking the drinks. Everybody else gets in on it and things very quickly turn into a witch hunt. Emmanuelle convinces everyone that it couldn’t be her because she was drinking the Sangria too.

So, who wasn’t drinking?? OMAR!

Omar(Sissoko) is quickly accused, grabbed, and thrown out in the snow. From there, several things happen in fairly quick succession:



1) Emmanuelle’s son (who’s, like, eight) is caught drinking the punch. Emmanuelle freaks and locks him up in the electrical room to protect him from the crazy dancers

2) Selva finds her friend Lou (Yacoub), who confesses to her that she didn’t drink because she’s pregnant. Another dancer finds her and upon finding out she wasn’t drinking either, beats her up and kicks her in the stomach.

3) Lou, hysterical and in pain, follows her and threatens her with a knife. Everybody gangs up on her, though and tells her she should kill herself. Lou stabs herself in the stomach.

4) Ivana (Temple) grabs Selva and pulls her back into a room for some girl on girl action. David (Guillermic) tries to break it up (Because he wants to have sex with Selva) but she kicks him out and proceeds to do the dirty with Ivana.

5) David stumbles on Gazelle(Palmer) and her brother Taylor(Kastle) about to have sex. Gazelle runs away from Taylor to the main room where everyone is in full, crazy acid-trip mode, writhing around, chanting, screwing, etc.

6) Everyone pretty much goes coo-coo.

From there, the movie kind of descends into a spinning, red-toned, kind of madness. Everyone has lost their ever-loving minds.

And by the end, we see shots of the aftermath. A couple of them are dead, a few are passed out and in bed together, one girl is tending to the remains of her burnt up hair because she was set on fire, Omar is a popsicle in a tracksuit, you get the picture.

The last shot is of Psyche, who’s still awake and sitting on a bed with her bags, a book on LSD coming out of it. She takes an eyedropper and puts what we assume is LSD in her eye.

So, what did I think of this one? Well, let’s start with the good points.


It’s a Gaspar Noe film, so you have to realize that it’s gonna be kind of messed up going into it. He doesn’t really make warm and fuzzy movies. It’s fairly well done. The style of the majority of the movie kind of follows the dancers around as they slowly go crazy in a seemingly one-shot, go-pro kind of way. The dancing is pretty entertaining too.

And it should ALSO be noted that the actress that plays Emmanuelle is trans. She's playing a cis-gendered woman and she does a pretty good job at it, too.  Noe gets points for inclusiveness on that.

The bad? Oh, my God, I can’t tell you how many times I was like; “Can we just get on with the dang plot already?” Yay for art and dancing and Spike Lee style homages and upside-down cameras, but I got the distinct impression that Noe forgot that the movie was supposed to go somewhere at some point. Like he just went “Oh! Right! Let me get the script so we can finish this thing!”

Do I like it? Eh. I didn’t hate it. I’ll give it a jewel for the sake of art.

Now, next week, we’re doing a good old fashioned slasher movie in Halloween..the last one that just came out, I mean. Yay for slasher movies!



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