DANCE WITH DEATH

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

There is something irresistibly sleazy about a slasher movie centred around a strip club. It's the ideal combination of sadistic violence and tacky nudity, with impoverished young ladies gyrating half naked even as a mystery killer bloodily picks them off. That the acting, writing, plot and directing are all functioning on the lowest possible level feels kind of irrelevant so long as there is a either an extended sequence of naked jiggling about or vicious knife murders every 15 minutes or so, and the script makes a decent fist of hiding the murderer's identity.

So it's pretty obvious that Dance With Death is rubbish. Co-written by Katt Shea Ruben, the film has newspaper reporter Kelly (Barbara Alyn Woods) going undercover as an exotic/erotic dancer at a seedy club where the performers are being picked off one by one. Who could the maniac be? Charmless club owner Martin Mull? The creepy weirdo who always sits right up against the stage? What about Kelly's editor? Meanwhile, undercover cop Maxwell Caulfield is there all the time, spectacularly failing to find the killer...

Even by the standards of low rent exploitation trash, this really isn't any good at all: functional as a grubby time waster but hardly a long lost classic of the genre. Yet again this has bypassed UK distribution entirely, instead finding a home as a murky looking YouTube upload. Completists may get a few chuckles out of it, but for anyone else it's really not worth the effort. Includes a brief and fully clad supporting role for Lisa Kudrow.

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