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.

What a pathetically bad movie. As a slasher movie, the tension and excitement are non-existent. If you're looking for gore, blood and guts,this isn't for you either. If you blink a few times while watching the movie, you might miss what little there is. The acting is soooo bad. It's hard to tell if they are trying to be that bad to be funny or are they really that bad. The characters are pitiful. There seems to have been very little thought put into this film. They did try to interject some humor into the film, which just made it worse. So let's see, it isn't scary, exciting, or humorous and the acting is terrible. But at least you have the dancing. No, you don't have that either. What you have is several girls trying to act like they are professional dancers all the while saying one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight as they do their so-called dance moves. The dancing is a joke, they are terrible. There is nothing in this movie worth watching. It's dull, boring, and poorly acted. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Do yourself a favor, don't rent this waste of plastic. Use the 50 cents to buy a Vanilla Coke and you will have a much better day.

This is not a slasher film. It is more like an after-school special with some bad words thrown in to get an R rating. The sound track (two songs repeated over and over countless times) has that homemade "Casio" sound. The supposed dance routines are not quite as professional looking as 6th grade cheerleading practice. The lousy attempts at humor are not nearly as funny as the fact that the writer/director actually put his name at the end of the film. Some people have no shame.

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.

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.