MovieChat Forums > The Creeping Terror (1964) Discussion > Punch-Up at the Dance Hall

Punch-Up at the Dance Hall

posted 15 years ago by aletharch
1 reply | jump to latest

So anyone who's seen this movie, if they make it as far as the dance hall sequence, will remember the utterly random inserts of two guys having a punch up. It completely baffled the MST3K guys ('Hey, enough with the subplot!') and certainly baffles me.

So what's it all mean?

My theory is that, having failed to come up with anything to stop his extras walking out of the dance hall, very slowly, in an orderly fashion, away from the monster, the best thing the writer-director-star could come up with was for the doorway to be blocked by... a punch-up.

Somehow a crowd of 100+ people are too scared to push past two small men hitting each other, and so everyone prefers to stay and get eaten by the monster.

Is it a daring metatextual reference to Scylla and Charybdis, the inescapable twin perils Ancient Greek mythology? Is it a commentary on juvenile delinquency literally consuming whole communities? My God, what is it?!

[–] notmrjohn 9 years ago

I'm witch yew,aletharch, but there are at least three guys involved. In first punch up scene, the infamous bare boob one, one of the two guys has longer hair than either guy in second scene. I've read at least one reviewer say the fight(s) were supposed to represent panicked riots jamming the doorway. Panicked rioters are always ripping women's clothes off So it's a 2, 3 or 4 man riot, 2 men at a time, in a large room, quite a distance from the door. Most of the crowd is standing around impatiently waiting for the terror to eventually creep over close enough so they can dive in head first, but the "riot" does seem to have panicked a couple of guys who lean against the wall with arms crossed disinterestedly watching the knuckle buster.

' Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.'-Marx