Dance Hall

Dance Hall (1929)

* (out of 4)

This here is one of the worst films I've seen from this era of Hollywood when they were switching from silent to sound but at the same time it's a must see. Tommy (Arthur Lake) loves his dance hall partner Gracie (Olive Borden) and wants to marry her but a good- looking aviator (Ralph Emerson) whispers a few things in her ear and she falls in love with him not knowing that he's just playing her. DANCE HALL is bad on pretty much all levels including a mysterious technical one that I'll get to in a bit. As for the movie itself, it's pretty awful right from the start with some very horrid performances, an obnoxious and predictable story and some of the worst direction you're ever going to see. What's really bad are the two lead characters because both are just so annoying and incredibly stupid that you just want to shake both of them in hopes that they'd wake up. I really can't think of anything "good" going on with this thing but thankfully it's bad enough to where it keeps you entertained. Now, the strange thing is that the audio track appears to be dubbed or something. The trivia section at IMDb is the only place I've seen comment on it and a search through various forums turned up nothing. The spoken dialogue is often seconds before or after the moving mouths on the screen. This apparent dub job is worse than those English version of various Godzilla movies and it's so bad here at times that people are done speaking with their mouths by the time the audio starts. I'm not sure if the original actors dubbed their own dialogue or not but whoever did the voice of Lake sounds just awful. Whatever the case is, DANCE HALL is without question one of the worst films I've seen from this period but it's also highly recommended to those who enjoy bad movies.