Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

In March of 2021 I did a podcast episode with Mitch from the Video Vacuum on Dallas Connection, but really it was on all the Sidaris LETHAL Ladies movies. Since then I've been trying to get all of those films reviewed here on the site, which brings us now to this gem. In addition to us and Mitch, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof action and RobotGEEK's Cult Cinema, have covered this.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii is kind of a sequel to Malibu Express, only now we have Cody's cousin Rowdy (Ronn Moss), and he works for the DEA with Donna (Donna Speir) and Jade (Harold Diamond). When Speir and her close friend, Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton), come across some stolen diamonds, they open up a world of hurt for local drug kingpin Seth Romero (Rodrigo Obregon), and he wants revenge. He takes their friend and fellow DEA agent, Edy (Cynthia Brimhall) hostage, and now it's up to Rowdy and crew to go in and get her out. At the same time, Donna and Taryn were transporting a large snake that got loose, and said snake has been contaminated with cancer. With all this happening, when will our heroes find time for topless hot tub moments and love scenes?

This film is simply fantastic. What else is there to say? Like I don't even know if that description does the movie justice, but by the same token, if you haven't seen this, I don't know how much I want to tell you and risk ruining you experiencing it all organically. It has a mix of serious and tongue-in-cheek that few films are able to pull off well, but Sidaris just gets it, and his cast does too. The one nit you may pick is that a lot of the backstory is delivered in dialog. "You're did this, this, and this some time in the past." "But do you remember when you did this, this, and this?" The thing is though, we always say, don't let the plot get in the way of the action, and I'd rather a line of dialog do what a five (or, gasp, ten!) minute scene would do so we get more people getting blown up with rocket launchers, more topless hot tub scenes, and more dirt bikes driving through walls of houses. This is the pure 80s Sidaris gem you came for.

While this is technically the sequel to Malibu Express, this is really the one that sets the stage for what the next ten of Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies movies will be; only after this one, the Abilene who can't shoot character gets diminished, and Donna Speir's character becomes the lead, up until she leaves the series and Julie Strain comes in. We also get our first Rodrigo Obregon as the baddie in this one, and he sticks around for all of the next ten films--meaning he probably should get a tag on here soon too. This establishes what I understood late-night cable viewing to be growing up, and while before I revisited all of them for the podcast episode I did with Mitch I couldn't tell you one movie from another, they still had that indelible impact that played a large role in getting me here to creating this site, and I think that can't be understated. In the trivia Sidaris said he funded this with the money he made from Malibu Express so he wouldn't be beholden to a studio. We here at the DTVC always want to support indie filmmakers, but also, it means we wouldn't have had the classics we ended up with had Sidaris been forced to compromise, and for that I'm grateful.

Also according to the IMDb trivia, Donna Speir said she was intoxicated for much of the production, but that Andy and Arlene Sidaris liked what she did and offered her a chance to come back in the sequel, which led to her getting sober. That decision to bring her back also changes the tenor of these movies from standard actioners led by fun, philandering playboys, to more female-driven films which weren't the standard at that time. We talk about how so few movies we do here on the DTVC pass the Bechdel Test, but this one does--even if Hope Marie Carlton is topless in one of the scenes. There's another scene where Sidaris plays a seedy filmmaker meeting with an actress he wants to cast. She says to him "you practically raped me last night!" and he tries to gaslight her and tell her how much he likes her as a person and wants to see her succeed. Not only does it give us a glimpse of what Hollywood was almost 30 years before Me Too--I mean Sidaris sounds exactly how Weinstein sounded when he was caught on tape trying to explain away an assault on an actress when he was talking to her the next day--but it also puts these LETHAL Ladies movies into a different kind of exploitation category. Because of how ahead of their time they were as far as female action leads, maybe we should be putting Speir up there as one of the best female action leads of all time.

Anytime I'm watching a movie from the 80s, it's fun to immerse myself in the trends and fashions that were cool at that time, but it was interesting here to see a couple trends that are popular now. One, on a few occasions the women wear leggings and boots, which is pretty much standard attire nowadays. When Speir and Carlton join Moss and Diamond in storming the baddie's lair to rescue their friend, they could've been wearing the same thing today and no one would've noticed--Moss on the other hand in his Speedo would've been a bit much. Also in storming the baddie's lair, Diamond opted for a man bun to keep his hair out of his face. It's not like the modern man bun though, it was more like what an older female guest star on All in the Family would've sported. Beyond that, there was one old term that I loved hearing. When one of the baddies passes Moss and Diamond by riding a skateboard upside down on his hands, Moss says "he must be smoking some heavy doobies." I don't remember the last time I referred to a joint as a "dooby." And not only that, but "heavy doobies," Just more of why this movie is so amazing.

Finally, people may think the snake in this looks ridiculous, but to me, what looks ridiculous is when people use real snakes in movies instead of just leaving the snakes alone to be snakes in the wild; or when people in Florida need pythons as pets, then let the snakes escape, so now they're in the ecosystem trying to swallow deer and alligators. Give me all the rubber snake puppets you have as the alternative. Just like, I want CGI lions, tigers, and bears, no matter how fake they look, instead of needing the real animals on movie sets. You want to have a real cat sitting on crate like we had during the end credits of this? That works for me. You need to have a chimp playing basketball? No, leave the damn chimp alone. If Lucas can use computers to insert Hayden Christensen into the end of Return of the Jedi, we can use computers to replace animals in our movies--with Hayden Christensen? And if it's not a computer, I'm happy with the puppet snake they used here.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, you can get this on Tubi here in the States. It's an absolute must watch, but also with it on Tubi, it's good for a rewatch as well if you haven't seen it in a while. Finally, you can find the podcast episode Mitch and I did on Sidaris movies in the archives under the title "Dallas Connection."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093146

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!