SUMMER OF 87 #3: Hard Ticket to Hawaii

The cover of my VHS copy of Hard Ticket to Hawaii

1.50pm, Day 1:

Hard Ticket to Hawaii
Director: Andy Sidaris
Starring: Ron Moss, Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Harold Diamond, Rodrigo Obregon
Format: VHS (RCA Columbia)

Plot: Two drug enforcement agents are killed on a private Hawaiian island. Donna (Speir) and Taryn (Carlton), two operatives for The Agency, accidentally intercept a delivery of diamonds intended for drug lord Seth Romero (Obregon), who takes exception and tries to get them back. Fellow Agency operatives Rowdy (Moss) and Jade (Diamond) get involved, and a full-scale fight to the finish ensues, complicated here and there by an escaped snake made deadly by toxic waste!

- Disclosure: I haven't seen this movie. In fact, this is my first Andy Sidaris movie. I've heard a lot about his stuff so I'm looking forward to this.
- Bare breasts and gratuitous shotgun violence before the opening credits. We're off to a good start!
- Super cheesy opening credits.
- Very Toto-esque theme song by Gary Stockdale.
- Donna to fellow blonde bimbo Taryn: "Let's unload and hit the jacuzzi, I do my best thinking there". I think that best sums up the vibe of this movie so far.
- "If brains were birdshit, you'd have a clean cage". The awesome dialogue just keeps coming!
- Sledgehammer of plot: Donna and Taryn have a poster of Malibu Express (the previous Sidaris movie) in their apartment. They mention that the star of that movie, Cody Abilene, is a cousin of Rowdy Abilene (Ron Moss' character in this movie). Awkward way to tie the two flicks together.
- The acting is terrible across the board, but Rodrigo Obregon's efforts take the cake. Laughably bad.
- Speaking of laughable, the snake special effects are hilarious. More hilarious than the actual jokes, that's for sure (most are the kind of toilet humour we all told when we were 10 years old).
- Andy Sidaris has a cameo in this as a TV director.
- So apparently (according to IMDB), Sidaris made quite a few sequels to this movie, with Donna and Taryn as recurring characters.
- First moment of sheer awesomeness: Bad guy on a skateboard with a blowup sex doll(!) gets taken out with a bazooka. And then the doll too!
- Man, this plot is all over the place. For no reason there's an interview with football players that pops up mid-movie, and the sub-plot with the mutant snake is so out of place with the rest of the plot.
- Great frisbee kill!
- And nice use of a microlite.
- I never knew bamboo furniture could stop bullets.
- Despite the two leading ladies being quite attractive, IMO the hottest chick in this flick is Cynthia Brimhall, who plays Edy. Apparently Sidaris liked her too, cause he recast her as Edy in five more of his flicks.
- Woohoo, Donna used the four-barrel bazooka off the VHS cover!
- Sweet Jebus that was a crazy ending. Mutant snake, bad guy that won't die, dirtbike, bazooka, spear gun, nunchucks, samurai sword... I love it!

Overall thoughts: I can now say I've seen a movie written and directed by the infamous Andy Sidaris. And I can honestly say I need to see more Sidaris magic!
Hard Ticket to Hawaii has bad acting, lousy dialogue (full of groanworthy jokes like "She's so dumb she went home to study for her pap test"), dumb special effects... but it's so much fun! You'll groan at the bits where you're meant to laugh and laugh at bits that're meant to be cool, but the one thing you'll never be is bored.
The best way I can sum up this movie is like this: It's as if Sidaris came up with the plot for a simple "chicks with guns" movie, where two hot chicks spend half their time naked and the other half battling some bad guys over diamonds. But then he realised that would only come to about an hour's worth of film. He needed other stuff to fill it out. To do that he wrote down a bunch of random words on pieces of paper and put them in a hat and drew a few out. Whatever he drew out he would throw into the movie. And the words he pulled out were: Mutant snake, sex doll, skateboard, bazooka, microlite, dirtbike, speargun, frisbee and American football. And somehow he managed to fit it all in and make a kickass movie in doing it!