CQAF and Normal Cinema Club are very excited and slightly scared to present the Irish premiere of Alan Resnick and Robby Rackleff’s DANCE FREAK.

A man on the edge gets pushed slightly further when his girlfriend breaks up with him. To make matters worse, he is confronted by his cavorting and contorting doppelganger (the titular Dance Freak) and is soon accused of crimes he didn’t commit. Thus begins a spiralling rabbithole of government conspiracy, lab experiments gone wrong, and surreal hyper-violence. With its finger on the pulse of our current dystopia of absurdist end-times, DANCE FREAK speaks truth to the power about the freaks really pulling the strings.

This nightmarish odyssey of corrupted identity is shot through with jet-black humour, aided by its starry cast of alt-comedy favourites including Stavros Halkias, Sarah Squirm and Normal Cinema Club favourite, Conner O’Malley. Their exploits are rendered in inky black & white, recalling the oozing discomfort of Eraserhead, yet updating that dreamworld for our terminally online world, pixels and digital noise abound. This lo-fi low-budget marvel was entirely crowdfunded, an inspiration to filmmakers, filmgoers and film-adjacents everywhere.

Who/what/why is Dance Freak? You’ll simply have to come and watch to find out.

The much-anticipated film from the team of Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick (Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It) has an absolutely stacked cast including luminaries of the alt-comedy scene and many past, present, and most likely future Baltimoreans: Robby Rackleff, Megan Koester, Sheila Mears, Jamel Johnson, Annie Donley, Stavros Halkias, Sarah Sherman, Allen Cordell, Adam Endres, Rachel Kaly, Conner O’Malley, and Nate Varrone.

Like their work for Adult Swim, Rackleff and Resnick’s film disorients the viewer in the best possible way. Dance Freak teleports us back to childhood sleepovers with friends, staying up way too late watching something warped, forbidden, and dangerously funny long after all the boring adults have retreated upstairs to bed. (Eric Allen Hatch)