Dancing with Danger

The team just about manage to turn Portland Oregon into Dark City with burned out copper turned P.I. Marinaro involved with Taxi Dancer Ladd.

Most interesting element is the Star Brite Club where Ladd plies her trade ("They choose me") and the customers do would be existentialist dialogue at the bar.

The deployment of Ladd's mask like features and the forties noir atmosphere hint at director Cooper's origins in British art cinema but the film is only marginally more atmospheric than the usual TV slasher film.Competent performance and production.

They actually do a pretty good job of setting up a noir atmosphere, thanks in no small part to the music. Granted, the story/script is average TV slasher/mystery. Its all about atmoshpere and that music! Wish I could find the soundtrack.

Try to watch it on a cold rainy day or night and see if you don't catch the mood and enjoy it!

If you're looking for a fast action drama / action show then keep looking. This movie is about failed big city romances, marriages and a failed big city cop, actually he just gave up because of a bad mistake. Cheryl Ladd has never looked more beautiful or sexxier then in this movie. There is a modest love scene and rather happy ending but you have to watch the thing to see it. Cheryl did a very great performance in this movie as did also Ed Marinaro. All the other actors had rather minor parts and the movie revolved around them. This movie has an honest but slow moving plot and you won't get it until the very end. Its the type of movie you can feel good about watching and not just another cheap high classed Hollywood flick. I hope you enjoy it as well as I did.

Lonely guy meets dancing babe who may or may not be a killer. There's the short of this bad made-for-TV flick. Back around 1998 I started a long TV-movie kick. None of these movies were actually good by real movie standards (limited acting, story, direction, artistry, technical skill etc.), but I got good feel for them. DANCING WITH DANGER was one of the movies I saw while on this particular train of viewings. It's bad, folks, really bad and that's when compared to other TV movies, which are inferior to real movies in almost every way.

What DANCING WITH DANGER is trying for is a noir feel. You get the old-fashioned music, the 40s style location, and the lady in red. This could have been a great idea if the writer and director could have put their heads together to do something instead of just having the idea. It proves even worse to have a fake style than to have none at all.

There are some truly pathetic scenes. In one scene, drama is attempted when our hero visits his ex-wife and asks her to dance with him (I'm being nice by even calling this an attempt at drama). The suspense is weak, but, like I said, this is a TV movie. The conclusion makes you sorry you bothered to watch the movie. In short: avoid.

This film begins with a crowd gathering around the body of a young man lying dead on a busy sidewalk in Atlantic City. The camera then zooms upon an attractive blonde in the crowd who turns and walks away just as the police arrive. The scene then shifts to a private detective in Portland named "Derek Lindor" (Ed Marinaro) being asked by a client to locate an attractive blonde by the name of "Mary Dannon" (Cheryl Ladd) who has recently moved there. And in order to help him in his search, he gives him a picture-which just happens to be of the same attractive blonde in Atlantic City. One thing leads to another and soon Derek locates Mary and informs his client that she is working as a taxi dancer at a local nightclub. Not long afterward, his client is murdered and this results in Derek investigating the situation even further. But what he doesn't realize is that he is soon to become a target as well. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that, considering the noir setting and the focus on Mary's choice of employment, I believe it would have been much better if the film had taken place in the 30's when taxi dancing was popular--rather than 60 years later when it's virtually extinct. Likewise, I would also have preferred a bit more action or suspense as well. That being said, while I don't feel like this was a bad film necessarily, for the reasons just mentioned everything seemed a bit out-of-place and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.