It's hard to believe anyone so upscale and unsullied as Cheryl Ladd would be working in a dance hall, but that's the premise of DANCING WITH DANGER. SWEET CHARITY without the music, this film is a moderately engrossing, made-for-cable thriller that's equal parts gumshoe adventure and
lovelorn romance.
Embittered and fleeing her tragic past, Mary Dannon (Cheryl Ladd) loses herself in the tangle of bodies in a Portland, Oregon, dance hall. Hired to locate her by Sam Daniels (Stanley Kamel), hot-tempered former cop Derek Lidor (Ed Marinaro) quickly takes a personal interest in the dame who has
"look but don't touch" written all over her classy chassis. When Lidor's client is murdered, he checks in with Sam's cousin Loren (Pat Skipper), moves into the same fleabag hotel as Mary, and vows to solve the case, even when Mary's dance partners start turning up dead. Is it a coincidence that
Mary is taking a cosmetology course, and that she owns a pair of scissors similar to the murder weapon?
After Mary's customer Steve (Sam Cooper) is killed in a vicious scissors attack, Derek beats up another of Mary's overly amorous clients. Mary and Derek begin a tentative romance. Derek survives a scissors skirmish as well as a switchblade assault by a degenerate on whom the cops pin all the
murders, and tries to reconcile with tempestuous Mary. Realizing that Sam's cousin Loren is the obsessive slayer, Derek rushes to the dance hall to rescue Mary from her deranged worshipper. With the crime solved, Mary's only in danger of falling in love with Derek.
By placing this damsel-in-distress thriller in a picturesque dance hall, DANCING WITH DANGER apparently hoped to wallow in an atmosphere of tawdry eroticism, but it's as chaste as a maiden aunt who's fallen face-first into a stack of Playboy magazines. Although Ladd and Marinaro are both
alluring, they lack chemistry; the result is a sex thriller whose sleaziness is squeaky clean. The film works better as a thriller, the red herring juggling act and misguided police work requiring the viewer to pay a modicum of attention in order to guess the killer's identity. (Graphic violence,
profanity.) leave a comment
