1987's Slam Dance is an Erotic Thriller. It's NOT About Dancing, Except It is, a Little
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Wayne Wang’s muddled 1987 Neo-Noir Slam Dance got terrible reviews, bombed at the box-office and was disowned by its director, who was so unhappy with how it was edited that he wanted his name taken off it.
It’s a movie that barely exists. Yet its poster made an inedible impression on the young me all the same for a pair of reasons. Being a horny kid whose interest in film was onanistic at its core, I was mesmerized and titillated by the image of Virginia Madsen in a tight, low-cut dress, looking dangerous, sexy and aloof, a quintessential femme fatale.
And I was perplexed, confused and deeply underwhelmed by its tag-line: “An erotic thriller. It's not about dancing.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a poster that felt the need to state what the movie it’s promoting is about as well as what it is not about.
The poster for Air Bud, for example, does not specify, “An animal movie for children. It’s not about an airline or marijuana” and Licorice Pizza’s tag-line is not “A coming of age story set in the 1970s. It’s not about about Italian food or candy.”
That makes me wonder if they test screened Slam Dance and the overwhelming response they got was, “This movie is terrible and I was confused because the title made me think that it was a musical. If you could explicitly state that it’s NOT a musical that might clear up the confusion.”
The people behind the film’s unforgettably misconceived poster couldn’t do anything about the film’s quality but they could let audiences know that they were not in for an extravagantly choreographed musical romp.
Slam Dance does at least nominally involve dancing. The title comes from the intense moshing that goes down at a gritty, seedy underground club where cartoonist protagonist C.C Drood (Tom Hulce) exchanges steamy glances with self-destructive woman of the night Yolanda Caldwell (Madsen).
Slam dancing—which this movie is definitely NOT about, as it is instead an erotic thriller—is supposed to come off as edgy and provocative, an angry dance of defiance rooted in aggression rather than seduction.
There is definitely an element of that in flashbacks to Drood and Yolanda’s drinking excessively and flirting outrageously but it also comes off as a little comic, a square’s conception of rock and roll rebellion.
Slam Dance wants to plumb the heart of darkness, to explore the depths of human degradation. Yet it’s also lightly, bizarrely comic at times in a tonally incoherent, self-defeating fashion. It alternates suggests David Lynch at his sleaziest and the pilot for an ill-fated sitcom about wacky goof trying to juggle his public life as a comic strip writer and his secret life as a hard-drinking lady’s man.
The mistakes begin with the miscasting of Tom Hulce as a smirky, quippy, irresponsible cartoonist with an annoyingly precocious daughter and a wife (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Helen Drood).who loves him but is tired of his shit.
Drood’s wandering eye eventually leads him to Yolanda, a tragic party girl with an aura of ineffable sadness. Drood knows that Yolanda is full of dark secrets and danger but he can’t resist her ripe and raw sexuality.
When Yolanda turns up dead a conspiracy quickly forms to frame Drood for her murder involving figures as disparate as corrupt cop Jim Campbell (John Doe in a rare bad performance), Yolanda’s powerful lesbian lover Bobby Nye (Millie Perkins), hitman Buddy (Don Keith Opper, who also wrote the screenplay) and powerful politicians who will do anything to keep their crimes and secrets hidden.
Adam Ant costars as our hero’s friend but he’s also sleeping with Drood’s wife so he’s honestly not that good of a buddy while Harry Dean Stanton is wasted in the oddly colorless role of a dogged detective investigating Yolanda’s death.
Slam Dance follows Drood as his search for the truth about Yolanda’s life and death and need to prove himself innocent takes him deeper and deeper into a lurid nighttime realm of sex, power and murder.
With his follow-up to the modest arthouse favorites Chan is Missing and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart Wang wanted to prove to the world and himself that he could make movies not explicitly rooted in the Chinese and Chinese-American experience.
On one level he succeeds wildly. Despite dreadful reviews and borderline non-existent box-office, the movie was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Iranian cinematographer Amir M. Mokri, who would go to shoot big budget fare like Fast & Furious, Man of Steel, Lord of War and Bad Boys 2.
The nomination is as deserved as it is unexpected. On a visual level, Slam Dance is a marvel. Mokri brings a photographer’s eye to every gorgeous composition. Every element of the film’s style has been thought out and realized to an impressive degree.
Crowded House keyboardist turned super-producer and composer Mitchell Froom’s score sets the perfect tone of lonely, sad, paranoid weirdness. As a mood piece that aspires to be the cinematic equivalent of a waking dream and intermittently succeeds, Slam Dance has a lot going for it.
On a story level and an emotional level, however, Slam Dance is more or less a total bust, a deeply unsatisfying muddle filled with one dimensional characters it is impossible to care about and an underlying conspiracy that is at first annoyingly convoluted and then confusing and then irritatingly simple.
As is generally the case, Madsen is far and away the best part of the film. That’s no small feat considering that Slam Dance begins with her dead and her few scenes are all flashbacks.
Slam Dance may not be about dancing. Or it might be! Who can possibly say! There are a lot of conflicting reports. But it’s not much of an erotic thriller either. It’s short on sex. Madsen brings the danger and the sensuality but she doesn’t have much in the way of screen time.
I’m glad I finally got around to watching a movie whose video box amused and enraged me in equal measure. Madsen is great, as always, but otherwise this is gorgeous nothing with all the style in the world and zero substance.
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