Stripped to Kill (1987) Review
5/10
A dancer is set on fire and thrown from a bridge. A detective goes undercover in the club where she worked, has to perform to maintain the cover, and discovers that she’s good at it and that this bothers her.
The 5 is for a film with an actual thought in it, executed under conditions that made the thought almost impossible to develop. Shea was given a quota of dance numbers and a budget, and the interesting material is what she did between them. What it’s not is a good film. The mystery is poor, the resolution depends on a reveal the audience can’t reach, and the dance sequences occupy something close to a third of the running time because that was the arrangement.
Stripped to Kill stings more than pure trash would, because there’s a smart film buried in it and the arrangement kept shoveling dance numbers on top of it. Whenever the backstage material starts to breathe, the film cuts to another routine or another stretch of a mystery I couldn’t bring myself to care about.
The Brief Was the Constraint
Corman’s specification for this kind of production was explicit and Shea has discussed it. A required number of sequences, a required length, a required rating, and creative freedom in whatever was left. Corman’s arrangement also specified a delivery date and a negative cost. That meant the schedule was fixed before a script existed. Shea has described writing toward a set of requirements instead of toward a story. That’s the most instructive thing about the film. Everything in it that works is happening in the gaps, and everything that doesn’t work is the material that was mandated. The idea is in the gaps. A woman performing an act she’s been ordered to perform, becoming competent at it, and finding that the competence is doing something to her that she didn’t sign up for. That’s a real subject and it’s also, quite obviously, the director’s own situation. Shea was given a brief requiring a set number of sequences and made a film about a woman required to perform a set number of routines.
A constraint you can’t refuse can become your subject. The material you’re required to include is also information about your situation, and writing about that situation is available to you. This is the most useful thing a working writer can do with an unwelcome requirement. Put everything you care about in the gaps. If the brief specifies what must be present, it hasn’t specified what happens between those things. The trap is that the mandated material will dominate the finished work regardless. A third of this film is quota, and no amount of good work in the remainder changes the proportion.
This is the real limit on the whole approach. A viewer doesn’t experience a film as gaps and quota, they experience it as one thing, and the one thing here’s a third dance numbers.
The Undercover Structure
Cody has to audition, be hired, learn the routines and perform, and the film spends real time on the process.
The rehearsal material is the best in the picture. She’s bad at it, the other dancers coach her, she improves, and the film treats this as work with a technique and not as a transformation.
The coaching scenes work for the same reason the ensemble material does. Somebody who knows how to do something is teaching somebody who doesn’t, and the film treats the skill as a skill. I’d have happily watched a whole movie of these women teaching Cody the job, and I’d have cut the murder plot to make room for it.
What the structure permits is the film’s one good sequence. That’s her first successful performance. She does it well, the room responds, and the film holds on her face registering that she’s enjoyed something she was doing under duress.
Kay Lenz plays that without commentary. There’s no scene where she discusses it, no speech about complicity, and the film simply establishes the fact and moves on. That look on her face is the one moment where I could see the movie Shea wanted to make, and it’s more than the surrounding plot manages.
Kay Lenz also plays the undercover work as a competence problem and not as a moral one. Cody is worried about being discovered, not about what she’s doing, and the film lets the second question arrive without her raising it.
Lenz had been a considerable prospect a decade earlier, having won an Emmy and worked with Clint Eastwood, and by 1987 was in Concorde pictures. That trajectory is the same one Tyrrell and Calhoun are on in Angel elsewhere on this page.
The Dancers
The club’s performers are given more than the format required and the material is the reason the film has any defenders.
Each has a routine that’s characterized instead of generic. One performs in a business suit, one uses a mirror, one works with a chair, and the film establishes that these are constructed acts with authorship.
The backstage conversations are the second good thing. Money, rotation, which nights pay, a dispute about a stolen routine, and the mechanics of a workplace discussed by people working in it.
The seniority question is the sharpest of them. Who gets the late slot, who has been there longest, and what happens when the manager gives a good position to somebody new, and none of it requires the plot at all. I liked these women more than anyone in the investigation, and I wanted the film to trust them with more of its running time.
That material is doing the same job the ensemble scenes do in Streetwalkin’ on this page, and both films were made under the same production model by directors who decided the women should talk to each other.
Give performers authorship of their own acts and they stop being interchangeable. A routine somebody built is a character detail and a routine that’s generic is decoration. The dispute about a stolen routine does more for that world than any amount of description.
Workplace mechanics are the fastest route to credibility in any setting. Rotation, pay, seniority and a grievance.
When two films under the same brief both find the same solution, the solution was available and the brief wasn’t preventing it. That’s worth knowing when you’re told a constraint makes something impossible. Shea and Freeman were also two of a very small number of women directing anything in this category in that decade. That’s probably not a coincidence and isn’t an argument either. Two data points inside one production company is a pattern worth noticing and it’s certainly not a conclusion about anything.
The Mystery Fails
The investigation is the film’s weakest element and the resolution is unfair in the technical sense.
The killer’s identity depends on a fact about a character that the film withholds entirely until the last five minutes, and no amount of attention would allow a viewer to reach it.
The film also front-loads a red herring that goes nowhere. It establishes a customer early as unsettling, pursues him for twenty minutes, and removes him without acknowledging that it’s spent a fifth of its running time on him. I resent those twenty minutes, because they could have gone to the backstage material, the only part of the film I cared about.
The New York Ripper has the same failure on this page, and it’s more disappointing here, because this film had built a world the mystery could have come out of. A dispute about a routine, a money problem, a rotation grievance, and any of those would have supplied a resolution the audience could reach.
The film also has a second reveal about a character presenting as something they’re not. That was a common device in this period and hasn’t aged into anything defensible. It’s played as a shock and functions now as a dated and unpleasant beat. The chase and confrontation are also perfunctory. Eight minutes, one location, and the film’s real interest has visibly departed by the time it arrives.
Norman Fell is also in it as the club owner, twelve years after Three’s Company. It’s another instance of the same pattern. A recognizable television face in a small part is what a production of this size could afford and what it used for marketing.
What Shea Did Next
She made a sequel, then Dance of the Damned, then Streets, and then Poison Ivy. It’s a considerably better film and was made on the strength of this one.
That trajectory is the argument for taking work like this. Four pictures under a restrictive brief produced a director who could make something with a budget and a cast, and none of it happens without the first one. She also directed The Rage: Carrie 2, which is the point at which the studio system absorbed her, and then largely stopped working for a long period. The shape of that career is common and it’s not a story about talent.
The real assessment of this film is that it’s a calling card with a real idea trapped inside a commercial specification. Anybody interested in Shea should watch Poison Ivy and then come back to this to see where it started.
Streets is also worth knowing about as the middle step. It’s a Concorde film about a teenage runaway in Los Angeles, is considerably grimmer than this one, and is where her direction visibly stops serving a brief.
Early work under restrictive conditions is a demonstration instead of an achievement, and it’s worth doing for exactly that reason. The judgment is whether the constraint left room for anything recognizable. Here it did, barely, and the room was enough to get the next job. Poison Ivy is the film to judge her on. It’s a budget, Drew Barrymore, Tom Skerritt and a real idea about class and intrusion, and the direction is confident in a way nothing here could be.
Watch the later work first and then the early work. The early piece becomes legible as an attempt once you know what the attempt was toward.
A career shape is rarely a story about ability. Access, timing and who was willing to finance a second film determine more of it than anything on the screen.
Should you watch Stripped to Kill?
Yes, as a demonstration. A director given a quota of dance sequences made a film about a woman required to perform a quota of routines, with good backstage material and a first-performance scene that works. Those earn it a 5. It doesn’t climb higher because the mandated padding eats a third of the running time and the mystery cheats, and a whodunit that hides the one fact you’d need to solve it is a cheap trick. Watch Poison Ivy first.
