Welcome to the WARPED DIMENSION for an extreme octane of VHS Surprise Night!
ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD Presents
WARPED DIMENSION TV----
Dance with the Devil aka Perdita Durango on VHS!
This week, we're going to MEXICO for the gonzo hell ride of VHS sex, drugs, and violence on our VIRTUAL VCR! with the controversial "Dance with the Devil" aka Perdita Durago on VHS! Starring Javier Bardem, Rosie Perez, Screamin Jay Hawkins, and James Gondolfini plus more in the most go-for-broke cult action film of the 1990s!
"Dance with the Devil aka Perdita Durango" IMDB SYNOPSIS---
"A psychotic criminal couple kidnaps a random teenage couple. The woman rapes the male captive, and lets him watch his lover being raped by the man. They then plan to sacrifice the couple".
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Benji
BONUS Warped Dimension Patreon Feature Article Below----
My Lost Amoeba DVD Review---Dance with the Devil (1997)
Back around 2013 during my working stint at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles---The days of MC Benji and VCR Craig hanging out in the video store.
The managers asked me if I'd like to start writing movie reviews for their online catalog---I was fresh off from watching for the first time Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Dance with the Devil, these two movies probably inspired me more than any other to write more grindhouse and lurid screenplays and stories instead of the more young writer autobiographic material I was trying to tell at the time.
Both movies were also consider major epic commerical failures in the 1990s when they were first released---only the past decade have the good folks like Severin, Death Waltz, and Museum of Home Video really brought back Dance with the Devil aka Perdita Durango and Fire Walk With Me again to find it's warped audience like us.
It's funny to me now that I'd picked Dance with the Devil over Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I love them both so much but Dance with the Devil connected with me it was like a Peckinpah meets Russ Meyer fever dream. I'm truly am excited for audiences to find a movie so gonzo cinema like Dance with the Devil aka Perdita Durango.
It's one of the movies that inspired me go searching for unexpected cinema and move to Mexico City to work on a movie after leaving Amoeba. Even a running joke was to find an uncut version of Dance with the Devil aka Perdita Durango during my time in Mexico City. I found a copy in Mexico that was even more censored than US version. A few months back programming future Warped Dimension shows---I found an old email that had the word doc article. It inspired me to share the movie for VHS Surprise Night.
Hope you enjoy the article unaltered for the time.
Amoeba never asked me again to write for their online catalog.
Benji (March 17th, 2021) --------------------------------------------------- My Lost Amoeba Review---"Dance with the Devil" from (April 12th, 2013)
Dance with the Devil is one hell of a blood, booze, and a million psycho bandits piled into the back of a dusty Chevy pickup gem of a movie. The kind of movie that come along once every full red moon, that'll punch you in the gut and smack a devilish smile across your face. Fans of gonzo type blood and road pictures like The Devil's Rejects and From Dusk till Dawn will get kick out of this lost body pileup-a-minute cult action movie.
The movie sports an outrageous international cast of Javier Bardem, Rosie Perez, James Gandolfini, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Alex Cox, and Demian Bichir. Each give a performance that pops out at you as so coked out and fire breathing nuts.
As the story goes, we meet Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez)-a woman that always has her heels licked by the fire and brimstone of life. She dreams of laying naked next to a jaguar and flashbacks of her families massacre. Hopping from border town to border town for her next thrill or sense of love-she meets up Romeo De La Rosa (Javier Bardem), a notorious outlaw and witch doctor. The kind of devilish killer character, who walks around in rattlesnake head skin boots, shrunken heads around his neck, and does a kilo-of-coke-a-day. Romeo might be the jaguar she is looking for, so they hit the road-robbing banks, kidnapping rich white kids for possible cannibal consumption, driving trucks filled with human embryos for skin care companies, and performing voodoo exorcism with Screaming Jay Hawkins.
Yes, yes, yes- all this stuff is crammed into the first hour of the movie. In hot pursuit is a wise cracking DEA agent (James Gandolfini), who is always this close of getting them but gets the snot kicked out of him before he can make his final move. Along the way the mob gets involved-something with the embryos in the truck going bad- not everything is clear even after a 3rd viewing but it all leads to a climatic shoot out at a Las Vegas airport hanger. Then again this movie has enough bullets and blood squib bursting for 10 action movie climaxes.
Funny enough, this is kind of sorta but not really sequel to Wild at Heart-(you know that little David Lynch movie that won some french award and starred some guy named Nick Cage.) Taking place in the same world as Wild at Heart, which are based on film noir expert and fellow Lynchian writer friend, Barry Gifford and his lurid novels. Dance with the Devil is an adaptation of his Perdita Durango and contains much more sexual fever and bottles of gut rotting tequila to soak up under the Tex-Mex baked sun than Wild at Heart. This movie has no happy ending for its a star psycho crossed lovers and relishes in that. Romeo tells Perdita throughout the movie, a story of him as a boy watching the 1954 western Vera Cruz and seeing the movie's anti-hero Burt Landcaster, die in the final showdown. As he says, “This is the only true way a real man can die.”
Made in Mexico around 1997 by Alexis De La Iglesia from Spain, who lives for this kind of multifaceted and ferocious razor licking filmmaking. If any one caught his latest movie The Last Circus, an epic clown horror war picture, you'll know this is one twisted mofo of a director. Here he is over 10 years younger and wants to see the cinematic flames fly high into the sky.
With De La Iglesia and and actor, Javier Bardem, they find match made in hell for the ultimate tale into hell. Even though Rosie Perez is technically the star of the movie, Bardem takes a hold of every moment he is on-screen and brands his wicked charm to it. Long before he gave us that cold blooded stare and horrible hair cuts in No Country For Old Men and Skyfall. The always sexy Bardem, here rocks a saucer bowl front and party back long haired mullet. Yet don't mess with him as Romeo, he'll eat your soul for breakfast and butter his toast with your bones-And you'll love every minute of it. If ever in the mood for a ride like no other and have a few beers to chase those shots of tequila in your gut, get in and hold on for dear life because hell is coming up fast behind the fumes of this movie.