Crazy ’80s

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/07/2019 (2594 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The so-’80s movie Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) pops up on Cinematheque’s Restorations Tuesday schedule by virtue of a 4K restoration courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive.

It’s a bit of a dicey rationale, considering the movie is purely an exploitation effort from boobs-and-guns auteur Andy Sidaris. A former Emmy Award-winning ABC sports director, Sidaris realized at some point in his life that he would be happier making silly action movies with Playboy Playmates in Hawaii, as opposed to being at the helm of a high-stress operation such as Monday Night Football.

A late-blooming career was born.

Sidaris has been compared to Russ Meyer given his propensity for gratuitous nudity, outlandish action and cornball humour. But Sidaris was never a stylist. As a filmmaker, he’s strictly utilitarian, although he had his quirks.

He clearly enjoyed creating action scenes utilizing the talents of fringe performers: skateboarders, Frisbee throwers, and even drag queens (all present and accounted for in Hard Ticket to Hawaii). He also loved toy helicopters used as weapons. If Sidaris hadn’t died in 2007, he would have been nutty for drones.

HTTH was Sidaris’s fourth action movie and sees the director hitting his stride when it comes to outlandish plots involving buxom women.

His heroine is Donna (Dona Speir), an agent of… “The Agency.” Alongside partner Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton), she works with the DEA to keep Hawaii relatively drug-free.

But when a ruthless drug kingpin called Mr. Chang (played by a mysteriously Caucasian actor named Peter Bromilow) starts playing rough, Donna and Taryn spring into action… but not in such effective fashion they don’t require getting rescued from their male counterparts.

As a cover, Donna and Taryn also operate an airline service on Molokai, and their gig includes flying a couple of honeymooners and a highly toxic snake to a far-flung honeymoon getaway. (In the ’80s, killer snakes constituted a horror sub-genre.)

On just such an assignment, they stumble on some bad guys who utilize smuggled diamonds to fund their drug business.

But of course, plot is really unimportant, even to the characters. When a friend of the gals, restaurant manager Edy (Cynthia Brimhall, another former Playmate), is kidnapped, presumably to be tortured for information, that doesn’t stop the gals from enjoying an evening of hanky-panky with a pair of studly DEA agents before getting down to the business of rescue.

Sidaris further throws in lots of tangential comedy scenes, the content of which can sometimes be sexist as hell, a quality that diminishes its value as juvenile fantasy fuel.

On the other hand, you have to admire the film’s more bizarre moments, as when a shotgun-packing skateboarder — utilizing a blow-up sex doll as cover — tries to execute the DEA agents and is himself blown up with a bazooka for his efforts.

Again… it was the ’80s.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing