Tom Hulce plays Drood, a struggling newspaper cartoonist who appears to live in a studio sized bathroom and who also seems to do most of his cartooning for his own benefit. He is separated but not fully divorced from his wife, Helen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), with whom he has a young daughter, Bean (Judith Barsi). One day, Drood returns to his apartment to find Buddy (Opper) waiting for him, having trashed the place. Drood is pulled into a car, where Buddy and another man try to extract information from him, but Drood falls out of the car and is picked up by the police. Detective Ben Smiley (Harry Dean Stanton) reveals that the likely connection between Drood and his attackers is Yolanda Caldwell (Virginia Madsen), a high-class call girl that Drood had been seeing who turned up dead a few days before.

It is hard to describe how strange the experience of watching Slam Dance is. On one hand, it is interesting to be placed in Drood's shoes, in that the viewer has no inkling of Yolanda until Detective Smiley mentions her name, yet some of this approach backfires on Wang. When Buddy shows up at Drood's apartment a second time and convinces him to go back to his regular life like nothing ever happened, there isn't much compelling reason for the audience to care what happened to Yolanda, especially when it turns out she wanted Drood to go away with him and he hesitated, possibly resulting in her death. Drood's relationship with Buddy gets stranger and stranger, with Buddy continually popping up with a different agenda each time. At some point during the movie, Buddy leaves Drood his jacket and, and Drood wears it for the rest of the movie.

A big part of the reason the movie seems so strange is that Wang seems sincerely uninterested in the thriller plot compared to the characters, one of the rare examples of a movie that actually shoots itself in the foot by focusing on people so much. So few details are ultimately given about the supposed conspiracy at hand that viewers could be forgiven for missing the resolution entirely, especially when it comes to the nearly arbitrary way Yolanda was tied into it. At one point, two characters discuss the consequences of Drood's actions while eating pizza, without the slightest sense of urgency or concern. Drood, meanwhile, drifts about, slowly transforming into a weird, angry character that doesn't fit Hulce's more natural goofiness. Mastrantonio radiates charisma, but she's underused in a subplot relating to both Drood and her own infidelity. Adam Ant also pops up as a club promoter / Drood's cartooning agent, which is a hell of a job title.

The great irony, meanwhile, is that the one character who might actually tie the whole film together, not to mention get us on Drood's side in terms of investigating further, is the one who remains almost completely mysterious. Madsen is certainly bewitching in her limited screen time, but the character of Yolanda ends up being more completely defined by the collection of perfectly placed salacious objects that fall out of her purse at a bar than she is by any sort of personality. She has almost no chemistry with Hulce, which makes sussing out their relationship more complicated, and the glimpses we get of them together are both brief and of almost completely inconsequential moments. Without a sense of the person who motivates Drood through his adventure is, the movie seems like a bizarre jumble of events, an adventure that zigs and zags without much direction. By the time the movie arrives at a ridiculous ending that routes itself through some stunning darkness to a questionably happy ending (one which only works when Yolanda isn't that important to Drood), it just feels like par for the course in a movie that throws the viewer around at random on a wild rollercoaster of half-baked ideas. I guess at least the title is kind of accurate.

The Blu-ray
Slam Dance arrives in art that naturally decides to give Virginia Madsen the spotlight even though her character is more of a MacGuffin than an actual presence in the movie. I'm also not entirely convinced the tagline ("Hot Kiss. Cold Sweat. Last Chance. Slam Dance.") has any actual meaning. The single-disc release comes in a standard Viva Elite Blu-ray case, and there is no insert.

The Video and Audio
Slam Dance is presented in 1.85:1 1080p AVC with a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 soundtrack. I recieved three Kino Lorber Blu-rays at once and they all fell within the same area of the spectrum, but each one has its quirks. Slam Dance's quirk is black crush and a certain hazy appearance, although one or both could be attributable to the original photography (if I were a betting man, I'd say the latter more than the former). A scene in an interrogation room features glowing white shirts and pitch-black backgrounds, and subsequent nighttime sequences feature a similar level of shadow detail (read: none), even when the haze is not present. Detail is decent, although the presentation is a bit on the grainy side, which can often look like noise. Daytime sequences have a nice appearance, but even then, the harsh grain is still apparent, adding flecks of white to the picture. Minor print damage is also present. The soundtrack captures enough of the movie's surreal, claustrophobic atmosphere to be considered effective, from the unusual acoustics of Drood's apartment to the dull throb of the nightclub where he does the requisite slam dancing. English subtitles are also provided.

The Extras
None, other than an original theatrical trailer. A trailer for Modern Girls is also included.

Conclusion
Slam Dance is a thriller that wants to resist the trappings of its genre, which is an admirable quality, but it avoids them so thoroughly as to become a strange mutation of a film that hardly seems to care about the conflict that drives its plot. Tom Hulce makes for a bizarre protagonist, swinging from a goofball with false teeth to a brooding husk of a man, then back again, and Virginia Madsen is sorely underutilized as the person whose existence ought to motivate the plot. Still, Kino Lorber has done a decent job of bringing it to Blu-ray and it might just be weird enough to justify renting it.