Dead Men Can't Dance (1997)

Director:

Stephen Milburn Anderson

Writers (WGA):

Paul Sinor (story)
Paul Sinor (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

18 April 1997 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Drama

Tagline:

The Cold War just got hot. Time to Rock 'N' Roll"

Plot:

Elite army unit is assigned to destroy North Korea's lone nuclear facility.

Plot Keywords:

Sergeant | Independent Film

Cast

Michael Biehn	...	Hart
Mark Edward Anderson	...	Wayne Northrup
Adrian Paul	...	Shooter
Kathleen York	...	Victoria Elliot
Greg Joung Paik	...	Maj. Kang
R. Lee Ermey	...	Sen. Pullman T. Fowler
Denis Forest	...	Dennis Larson
Grace Zabriskie	...	Brig. Gen. Burke
Janet Price	...	Orderly
Paul Perri	...	Maj. Shelby
John Carroll Lynch	...	Sgt. Plonder
Barbara Eve Harris	...	Sgt Rhodes
Jennifer Blanc	...	Sgt. Susie Warzenak
Shawnee Smith	...	Sgt. Addy Cooper
Wendy Gazelle	...	Sgt. Lorraine Towers

Also Known As:

DMZ (USA) (working title)
Rangers (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for strong combat violence, and for language.

Runtime:

97 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Australia:MA | Germany:18 | South Korea:15 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Philippines

Company:

City Entertainment

Trivia:

While shooting a fight scene, Michael Biehn stepped on and broke one of 'Paul, Adrian''s toes.

Quotes:

Shooter: There are no loyalties, only targets.

Movie Connections:

Features Dirty Dancing (1987)

Dead men can't dance, and working actresses can't soldier

Utter crap, seriously. Dead Men Can't Dance is a contrivance of the most common war-military-espionage scenarios and plotlines, swallowed too quickly and regurgitated onto celluloid in a tragically haphazard manner. It takes a platoon of female Rangers (of which no such thing exists) and puts this inexperienced bunch, led by a greenhorn captain fresh from a desk, on patrol in the de-militarized zone between the two Koreas (which is never actually patrolled these days). While in the DMZ they get inexplicably fired upon by those nasty North Koreans, and encounter some CIA spooks as all hell breaks loose. But because of their heroics the nasty North Koreans are brought to heel, and they are forced to stop breaking the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It is the most frightful nonsense. If you were going to insert a squad of 'crack troops' on a crucial mission in a place like the DMZ, why do they have to be inexperienced and why did they have to be predominately women? This smacks of tokenism to me, as does the title of the film which really has nothing to do with the story (it's justified by one of the Rangers muttering it every time he kills someone). There's an Asian lieutenant in the platoon who's petrified of tunnels because "of her time in Vietnam", even though she looks young enough to have been conceived ten years after the Vietnam war finished. And there's also the typical and rather cliched cinematic squabbling between the noble military and sneaky, immoral intelligence spooks. Ho hum.

I'm really surprised R. Lee Ermey got involved in something that stinks so much as this film. At the very least he could've lent the gals a hand to at least *look* like soldiers, because they rarely manage it. Perhaps he was too busy thinking about firing his agent for landing him in this woeful cow-pat of a movie. Avoid like the plague.