A married cartoonist named C. C. Drood becomes involved in the cover up of a political sex scandal after his lover, Yolanda Caldwell, a call girl, is found murdered.
Drood has betrayed his wife Helen with the exotic Yolanda, whom he meets at a club where the patrons slam dance, violently crashing into one another on the dance floor.
Bobby Nye, a former lesbian lover of Yolanda's, hires a hit man named Buddy to do away with Drood, who is also hotly pursued by the police. Drood ultimately comes to believe that Bobby and Buddy are the ones responsible for Yolanda's death. A corrupt cop, Gilbert, is doing everything in his power to pin the whole thing on Drood, but a police colleague, Smiley, intervenes on the wanted man's behalf.
Buddy is eventually overcome with guilt in his role in the killing of Yolanda, so he spares Drood's life and takes his own. To escape with his wife and his life, Drood tries to make Nye and the cops believe that Buddy's body is actually his.
After writing and directing Chan Is Missing and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, the latter receiving "mixed reviews [and] modest [...] box office earnings", Wayne Wang chose to direct Slam Dance to avoid being seen as a director primarily of stories about Chinese Americans; as such, it was Wang's first film in which none of the main characters are Chinese.[3][4] However, constant interference on the part of the producers led him to try and get his name taken off the film.[citation needed]
The film grossed $486,881 in the United States[5] on a $4.5 million budget and received mixed reviews. Critics had some praise for the acting and cinematography, but faulted the plot as disjointed and confusing. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote in his November 6, 1987 review that Wang "goes straight if quite gracefully to the bottom with his first mainstream movie", describing it as "less interesting for its characters than for its fancy decor and images."[4]
