Slamdance movie review & film summary (1987)

The dead person is played by Virginia Madsen, which means her role is going to be a little thankless. She has to play it entirely in flashback and isn't around for Hulce's sparring matches with Harry Dean Stanton, a vice cop who thinks he has seen it all. Stanton has reasons to suspect that Hulce has killed Madsen, and it is up to Hulce to prove him wrong.

That means re-establishing a friendship with his former wife (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who hates his guts but still sort of cares about him. You know how it is. They have a small child, and so of course the child is caught in the middle (small children are never brought into stories like this for any other reason).

The plot of this movie is a little infuriating, because it gets in the way of the people. Hulce is an enormously engaging young actor, as he proved in "Amadeus" and has demonstrated again in all of his roles. Give him his head and he's entertaining just taking a guided tour of the plot. "Echo Park" was an episodic, rambling movie, and I have a feeling episodic rambling is also more suited to Wayne Wang, the director of "Slamdance," than this story, which reads like a cross between film noir and film school.

Wang is the director whose "Chan Is Missing" was a quixotic Chinatown comedy that cost something like $28,000 and won the hearts of just about everyone who saw it. Then, with more money and much greater assurance, he made "Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart," the comedy about contemporary Chinese-American life than contained a romantic Catch-22: The old uncle was in love with the heroine's mother, who would not remarry as long as her daughter was at home, and her daughter would not marry on the grounds that her mother needed her.