Murder Rock (1984)

aka Murder-Rock: Dancing Death

Original title: Murderock – Uccide a passo di danza

An advanced dancing class of aerobics-style hopping promises the “kids” (that’s what the film calls this group of young women and men in their twenties) getting through the somewhat harsh treatment of former dancing nearly-star Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos getting up to some increasingly phantasmagorical scenery-chewing) a bright future with a big time Broadway company.

Well, as a matter of fact, said company only needs three dancers, a revelation that’s certainly going to lead to a lot of drama once it leaks down to the students. On the plus side, a mysterious killer begins murdering their way through the students, using chloroform and a stylish pin, so someone’s probably gonna end up as default member of the final three, dancing talent or lack thereof notwithstanding.

The investigating police lieutenant, Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) – given director Lucio Fulci’s love for the arts, I’m pretty sure named after the great writer of the weird –, certainly can see the wish to better oneself as a dancer as a murder motive. However, there’s a lot else going on, from a suit sleeping his way through what appears to be basically all of the dancers, to the jealousy of Candice’s predecessor Margie (Geretta Geretta), doomed to be her replacement’s assistant.

Then there’s the series of curious dreams Candice has in which she is followed by a man she has never seen before (Ray Lovelock) and who is trying to kill her with a stylish pin that looks a lot like the murder weapon. Turns out the guy is real, called George Webb, and in showbusiness, though not terribly successful thanks to some shadiness in his past. Obviously, Candice starts on a relationship with him right away. I can’t see how this could go wrong.

Murder Rock is usually not listed among many people’s favourite Lucio Fulci films, and I was certainly included among that number until my recent revisit of the movie. Now, I’m not quite willing to put it up on the pedestal of one of his very best films, but there is actually a lot to like about this giallo.

Of course, very fitting for a Fulci movie, before you can get to the pleasure you have to go through some pain, namely the film’s first third or so featuring a horrifying number of dance numbers in the aerobics inspired style you’d expect from an fad-conscious Italian movie made in 1984. There’s a lot of sweaty, aggressive swinging of body parts towards the camera, and so much crotch work, as well as crotch-level camera work, that a film whose actual nudity consists of some bare breasts feels wildly sleazy in a somewhat unpleasant way. The music, by Keith Emerson in his Italian soundtrack composer phase, gets appropriately painful in these sequences, but it is also immensely catchy in a way which suggests Fulci and Emerson cackling gleefully at the damage they are doing to innocent brains who only came to witness some crotch shaking and murder.

Eventually, the film does get away from the dancing a little, only returning to it for some actually pretty clever throwbacks to earlier scenes, and to ratchet up the intensity of the killer reveal, the filmmakers clearly having come to the conclusion their audience is now singing about paranoia coming their way without any outward help needed anymore. Once Murder Rock has reached that point, it turns into an often dream-like (in the patented Fulci way) giallo that seems genuinely interested in turning the destructive effects of the incessant striving for fame and glory into a horror movie. Quite a bit of what we see and hear from the characters may have little to do with realistic human psychology but works rather well to hammer away at that theme with the help of a cast of characters where not a single non-cop member isn’t in some way, shape or form obsessed with and damaged by becoming successful. Which is quite the thing to witness in a crotch-shake heavy movie called Murder Rock.

Curiously enough for a director and a genre not known for logical consistency but fitting to the rest of the script, even the plotting is not as weird as it first seems. In fact, a lot of what feels like a series of plot holes in the first acts does make perfect sense once we get to the reveal of our killer, the film simply playing fair with its audience like a proper, old-fashioned mystery would. Imagine Agathe Christie with more leotards and aerobics. Of course, the plot makes sense in the melodramatically heightened world the film takes place in rather than by the rules of real world logic, but who watching a Fulci movie would want it any other way?

A final way in which Murder Rock plays against expectations is a choice of murder method that basically completely blocks Fulci from doing any of his at this point in his career patented gloopy gore stuff at all, suggesting a director interested in doing things a bit differently this time around. The quality of the murder scenes demonstrates rather well that Fulci could have gone completely gore-less if he had wanted and still would have been able to make proper horror movies, but clearly, the great man couldn’t resist the lure of a good eye mutilation forever.