Slash Dance

My review was written in July 1989 after watching the film on Glencoe video cassette.

Catchy title notwithstanding, "Slash Dance" is a meek horror thriller headed for home video shelves.

Filmmaker James Shyman's tame approach is more slasher-film meets "A Chorus Line" than the Jennifer Beals pic punned upon. A maniac is killing the young women auditioning for a role in a musical show at the Van Slake theater. Lovely cop Cindy Maranne goes undercover as a dancer to root out the baddie.

Minor plot pits Van Slake heirs Joel von Ornsteiner and William Kerr as prime, too-obvious suspects.

Pic suffers from too much attempted comic relief (Von Ornsteiner's geek-style overacting is a pain) and surprising prudishness. Dancing, endlessly shown in rehearsal form, is boring and staged without style. Tech credits, especially Geza Sinkovics' colorful lensing, are above average.

This slasher-with-not-much-slashing is NOT the Lucio Fulci flick (aka Murderrock). With a title like Slash Dance, I was expecting this to be a hoot. This is apparently a little-seen movie and it should stay that way. Young women start disappearing when showing up at a shoddy Hollywood theatre to audition for...um...a chorus line or something. A detective goes undercover and...um...joins it. The story doesn't make sense, the acting is painful, and the dancing is even worse. The 80s fashion and music is the kind that everyone tries to forget. There are several failed attempts at humor that don't work because of stoneface delivery. The most bizarre part of this movie is that some of the castmembers (including the abs-of-steel lead) were GLOW wrestlers. There are also two characters that are apparently beach steroid dealers that act like...well...pro wrestlers. If you really enjoy bad 80s movies that are borderline "so bad it's good," then you might get some chuckles out of this. I didn't quite make it to that point. My rating: 1/10

In the magnum opus that is SLASH DANCE, someone is murdering the beautiful female dancers of Hollywood. It's up to undercover cop Tori Raines (Cindy Ferda) to infiltrate the killer's hunting ground (aka: an old theater) and get to the bottom of the unfathomable terror.

Can Tori stop the heinous monster before he kills again? Well, no, but she sure can dance!

For those who long for those simpler, more MTV-influenced days of yesteryear, SLASH DANCE will transport you there!

WARNING: This movie contains scenes of intense Spandex and legwarmers!...

Quite entertaining for a lower budget independent film. Whenever the film begins to slow, it is saved by the decent acting and pretty face of Cindy Maranne (Americana GLOW Wrestling). If you're a straight-to-video fan from the 80's you'll love this flick.

Slash Dance is a bizarre comedy/horror from the late 1980s about some women being killed while auditioning for a musical. Cindy Ferda stars as an undercover cop investigator these murders. She meets some odd characters like two female wrestlers selling steroids, a guy who takes his fake eyebrows off and a man who likes to flash. I like offbeat 1980s horror comedies when they are fun, but Slash Dance isn't really all that fun of a watch. I feel a movie with that title should be a little more entertaining and fun. Cindy Ferda plays her part ok enough but the dialogue and over-the top-ness from other actors is just brutal. It's just not interesting enough for my whacky 1980s tastes.