Publication Date: 01-30-2026

Slam Dance (1987) review

Dir. Wayne Wang

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

Following great success with his debut Chan Is Missing and his follow-up Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart — two lovely movies that offered audiences a rare glimpse into the lives of Asian-American individuals — writer/director Wayne Wang appeared to get a little antsy. How he ended up directing Slam Dance, his first mainstream movie, released under the same studio as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, is a mystery I’ve not solved. How he got linked up with writer/producer Don Keith Opper (Critters) begs a story nobody has seemingly written yet. And how he was led astray to make something as dour and borderline unwatchable as Slam Dance begs an explanation, but contradictorily, the ignominy in which the film lives is fitting in itself.

I get the impression that Wang was presented with a series of spec scripts and blindly picked one to pursue. Or perhaps he had dinner with Opper, who explained his vision for a nonlinear neo-noir thriller that’s best iteration might’ve been the cocktail napkin on which it was written. The only concretion for such a sudden pivot in his career was the fact that he didn’t want to be subjugated as a director of Chinese stories and nothing more. Totally understandable. Whatever the case may be, the film that qualifies as his breakout, from a budgetary and release standpoint, is a grave miscalculation.

The film revolves around a cartoonist named Drood (Tom Hulce), who is divorced from his wife (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and often forgets to pick up his young daughter (the late child actress Judith Barsi, whose tragic story you should know). Drood inadvertently becomes ensnared in a scandal when a call girl named Yolanda Caldwell (Virginia Madsen) is found dead in his home; logically, he’s the prime suspect. He met Yolanda at a club, but once she turns up dead, Yolanda’s lesbian lover (Millie Perkins) hires a hitman to off him all while a terribly underutilized Harry Dean Stanton, as a police officer named “Smiley” no less, tries to solve the case.

Anyone who is familiar with Wang’s previous two movies knows just by reading that general synopsis that this is the exact opposite movie he should be making. Wang’s strengths as a director were in his treatment of multigenerational characters coupled with his languid, almost brazen disregard for conventional pacing in favor of a structure built on a series of vignettes. Conventional plotting — much less a nonlinear murder mystery involving a flunky cartoonist, a dead hooker, a scorned lover, an ex-wife and child, cops, and moshpitters — is something that eluded him, and bites him badly in Slam Dance. Wang has no handle on the material the same way Opper needlessly complicates this story by flashing backwards and forwards, disrupting chronology for the sake of being crafty.

I’ll remember Slam Dance for one thing: the inclusion of Stan Ridgway’s song “Bing Can’t Walk.” I’d never heard it before, and after listening to it multiple times since watching the movie, I can’t tell you what it’s about. It struck me the moment I heard it, for I recognized the voice. Sure enough, Ridgway was the lead singer in Walls of Voodoo, the band behind one of the greatest songs about the medium of radio (“Mexican Radio“). As a career radio DJ, I can attest that there is value in tuning into radio stations all over the world just to hear the differences (and similarities) in how the medium is used cross-culturally. What I’m saying is, I can confirm that Greek and Mexican radio stations are easier to follow than Slam Dance.

My review of Chan Is Missing
My review of Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
My review of Eat a Bowl of Tea

Starring: Tom Hulce, Virginia Madsen, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Harry Dean Stanton, Judith Barsi, Millie Perkins, and Don Keith Opper. Directed by: Wayne Wang.