Alfred Hitchcock‘s North By Northwest essentially served as a gateway for a flood of movies about the wrong guy in the wrong situation, with a few reshaping the theme into their own blend of classic, most notably the Bruce Willis action thriller Die Hard. A year before that movie changed the game though came director Wayne Wang‘s failed Slam Dance, a noir-inspired mystery starring the then hot Tom Hulce that barely got a chance in theaters and sank into oblivion shortly after.
Hulce plays C.C. Drood, a panel cartoonist in a failed marriage to Helen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the two having a young daughter. He’s on a bad streak, his editor on his back for his constant missed deadlines, which has him dodging phone calls, but more than that is his involvement with an erotic dancer named Yolanda Caldwell (Virginia Madsen). See, she’s just turned up dead and the cops, led by Detectives Smiley (Harry Dean Stanton) and Gilbert (John Doe) think he might be responsible. Worse, Yolanda was mixed up with the wrong people and one of them hires an emotional hitman named Buddy (Don Keith Opper) to take out Drood, permanently. Now Drood’s gotta stay low and keep out of trouble while he tries to figure out who Yolanda really was and why he’s stuck in the deadly middle.
Written by Don Keith Opper, best known for the Critters franchise, Slam Dance is a deeply stylistic thriller that is overripe to a degree, clearly influenced by the times, with its Miami Vice vibe and MTV bravado. Admittedly, the script is thin and as such, Wang pads out much of the film with extended moments drowning in electronic music (and later, bits of opera) and slow cheesy dialogue, trying to piece together a bit of mystery that often doesn’t connect. That’s of course looking back from today with modern hyperkinetic titles struggling to keep short-attention span audiences interested. Wang might not know best how to pace out his thriller but it’s by no means boring, even with lulls that tend to soak out the 90 minute runtime.
Hulce, still basking in the favor of his Oscar-nominated role at Mozart in the 1984 biography Amadeus, is well cast and does a good job as the spiraling cartoonist/turned investigator, caught in a decaying web that puts him in a very dark corner. However, Mastrantonio is all but wasted, barely in the film, and the alluring Madsen, seen briefly only flashbacks, is never really fleshed out to have the impact her character should (even though she is the only person on the film’s official poster). Scenes with Stanton and Doe are almost laughably stiff, the film dipping deep into the cheesy gumshoe noir serials of the 40s, delivering dry, monotone one liners in stark shadows that really upset the tone of the film. It’s like two different films glued together.
Still, there’s plenty of solid little twists in Slam Dance, named after the style of dance more commonly called moshing – made popular in the 80s punk craze – featuring the standard colorful language and brief female full frontal nudity many movies of the time seemed bound to. It’s actually a pretty good bit of fun with a twisted third act that truly saves it, the ending a tight, gritty piece of work that makes it all worthwhile (even if one moment is geographically impossible). This hardly made a dime in theaters on release, far better suited for a late night rental that made going to the local DVD store so much fun. While it might be hard to find, it’s worth the search for fans of 80s thrillers and film buffs alike.