I have less to say about Dancing at the Blue Iguana as a movie than as a footnote in LA history. Despite the presence of Darryl Hannah, Sandra Oh, Jennifer Tilly, and Robert Wisdom, the cast member who piqued my interest was David Amos. This was his last movie before he did ten years in prison for his involvement in a murder for hire. More on that later.

Blue Iguana is a strip club soap opera. It goes low on the glamorization but heavy on the soap. Sandra Oh plays a stripper who writes poetry on the side. Jennifer Tilly plays an unstable maniac. Charlotte Ayanna dates a guy who's more of a pimp than a boyfriend. Sheila Kelley gets a skeevy incest angle with Elias Koteas as her brother.

Darryl Hannah seems to have a concussion. When someone asks her if she's the model in a billboard ad, she says, "Yeah. I'm a lot smaller in person." She tries to adopt a foster child with predictably disappointing results. Sandra Oh struggles to convince her that the caseworker won't appreciate the bong on her coffee table or the rat living in her air conditioner.

There's pervasive drug and alcohol abuse. Cat fights in the dressing room. Pregnancy scares. Lots and lots of bare skin. Blue Iguana hits all the notes you'd expect from a melodrama about strippers. The performances are adequate, but it never quite gels into a story.

Now that the movie chat is out of the way, let's get back to David Amos. His real life had some uncomfortable resemblances to the sleazy crime dramas he made, right down to his colorful nickname English Dave.

Back in the eighties, a couple of disgraced ex-cops named Michael Woods and Horace McKenna ran strip clubs in Los Angeles. Amos was Woods's bodyguard. In 1989, Woods and McKenna got into a disagreement over their business. The disagreement became moot after McKenna was shot to pieces with an Uzi while he was sitting in the back of his car. Woods took over the strip clubs and made Amos his partner.

A few years later, Woods started producing low-budget movies while Amos dabbled in acting. Their first movie was The Takeover (1994), a terrible gangster flick about drug lords attempting a hostile takeover of a strip club chain. The club owner gets shot to pieces while sitting in the back of his car. Woods had enough discretion to stop short of naming the character Mckenna, but he couldn't resist using the names of their real strip clubs.

Despite a direct-to-video confession being available at Blockbuster, McKenna's murder remained unsolved for another five years. Woods and Amos even made a second gangster flick called Flipping (1996), which was a little better than Takeover but still miles away from good. Then a former strip club employee named John Sheridan confessed to the police. Woods had paid Amos $50,000 to arrange McKenna's murder. Amos gave half of it to Sheridan to be the trigger man. Amos subsequently cooperated with police and wore a wire to gather evidence against Woods. From the dates, it looks like Amos was dealing with this case while Blue Iguana was still in production. The LA Times ran stories about their arrests and sentencing.

Incidentally, The Takeover was distributed by Live Entertainment, the company previously owned by Jose Menendez. If that name doesn't sound familiar, you might remember his sons Lyle and Erik.

I have to agree with Woods and Amos on one point: this circus sounds like it could be turned into a pretty good movie. They just shouldn't be the ones to make it.

Oh, yeah. This review is actually about Dancing at the Blue Iguana, so I guess I should give it a rating.

5 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.