A hapless man is accused of crimes committed by his dancing doppleganger in Roby Rackleff & Alan Resnick’s Dance Freak, an absurd comic-horror playing as part of the Fantastia Film Festival.
Great to break into this year’s Fantasia Film Festival with such a strange, weird, and wonderful slice of oddity. Dance Freak, written and directed by Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick, is an enigmatic slice of comic-horror, one that struck me in interesting ways. But that “interesting” is doing a lot of work, as Dance Freak makes me feel like I’m watching something so strange I can’t help but feel odd in all the best ways.
With a cast of Roy Rackleff himself, Nat Varrone, Rachel Kaly, Stavros Halkias, Connor O’Malley, and Sarah Sherman, I’m reminded of Richard Elfman’s 1981 cult classic Forbidden Zone. Not for any plot and style similarities, Forbidden Zone and Dance Freak are very different films outside the shared black-and-white cinematography (particularly in the use, with an occasional greenish sickly haze and a dash of color). But like that mondo musical, Dance Freak is a campy collection of alt and avant-garde comedians coming together to make a bizarre flick that strikes their interests. And if those interests align with yours, you’re golden.
Let’s see if they do. Obie finds himself over his head, both due to his issues with, well, anything, and as he gets connected to a creation, a version of him who loves to dance. And dance freak perhaps? After Rackleff’s Obie, a schlpy loser, is broken up with by his Dorty, his politician girlfriend played by Megan Koester, people in a small, dirty town (reminded of Fucktoys derelict village) start ending up dead, drawn in by the compelling dance moves of an odd dude and forced to die in a variety of methods. But it only gets weirder, as the connection between the Dance Freak and Obie manifests in different ways upon their bodies. Of course, I dare not explain how, but not in a way one would expect. There’s a feeling of Darren Aronofsky’s premiere film Pi, in the way it presented its ideas and filming in a Dutch angle of production, and of course, the easy, but fitting reach, of early Lynch.
Dance Freak is a purposely aggressive movie. It starts immediately with the strength of a scene indicating a full-bore, take-on-danger of art and continues as Obieis is confronted again and again on the street, by a man trying ot sell his girlfriend as a prostitute and a series of “salad boys” including Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman. It’s an assault on his and our senses, with an inescapable horror, done very humorously. It’s all hilarious, a flattened over-the-top. A series of non-sequiturs and odd running gags continues through the film. It’s a Kafkaesque hellscape, by way of [adult swim] (which makes sense as the creators made Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House has People In It for the sub-channel), where he’s forced into rules and regulations he doesn’t know, and no one will tell him any information to run with, time gets wondky and what’s actually happening at any point. It’s the right sort of nonsense. Everyone is working at 100%, pushing at Rackleff is a delightful malice.
Dance Freak is the sort of movie that’s not going to appeal to everyone, heck, most people. But for those it does, it’ll strike directly into the weird, off-kilter heart. Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick make something wonderfully weird for those who go for [adult swim] anti-humor absurdism. As I do, Dance Freak entranced me with its swirling, hypnotic moves. Dance Freak plays as part of the Fantasia Film Festival 2026, running in Montreal from July 16th through August 2nd.