Picasso Trigger (1988)

In our continuing goal of getting all of the Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films on the site, we come to this film here, the fourth one we've covered so far. With 12 total in the series, I guess we can say we're a third of the way there, so we're not quite like Tommy and Gina living on a prayer. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this--and he was on our podcast episode about Dallas Connection where we discussed all the Sidaris films--and Bulletproof Action--though not Todd Gaines, who's renown for being big on all of these movies.

Picasso Trigger has John Aprea as a crime boss of the same code name who is killed by fellow crime boss Rodrigo Obregon. From there, Obregon tries to kill off all the agents that put his brother in jail, which means the Agency needs to call their best agents into action to take him and his cronies down. Leading the crew is a new Abilene, Travis (Steve Bond), who still can't shoot straight, but is doing well with the ladies, moving between Dona Speir, and the mysterious agent Pantera (Roberta Vasquez), whom he dated in college. Will Abilene and his crew be able to take all these baddies down?

This, like the others in the LETHAL Ladies series, is a lot of fun. I think this takes what was established in Hard Ticket to Hawaii and turns it up even more. We have all the guns, explosions, remote control toys, dirt bikes, jet skies, and Ferraris you'd want, plus all the boobs and buttocks. There are also a lot of names in this, from the classics we all know and love like Speir, Obregon, Hope Marie Carlton, Cynthia Brimhall and Harold Diamond, but we also get DTVC favorite Keith Cooke, Bruce Penhall in his first appearance in the series, and Dennis Alexio, one short year before he was killed in Kickboxer so Van Damme could go to Thailand and have a great drunk dancing scene. On the other hand, this might not be as much of a classic as some of the others--like Hard Ticket to Hawaii--so if you're introducing people to the series, or you're getting into them yourself, you might want to try one of those others first, and come to this one after. Still worth your viewing though.

By the time we get to this third film, you could sense that the Abilene who can't shoot straight may have lost its luster a bit. I think more than anything that's because Steve Bond, while good, isn't as remarkable as the original Darby Hinton, or Ronn Moss after, who was also a step down from Hinton. I realized when I wrote the Hard Ticket to Hawaii review that I'd jumped the gun on when Sidaris moved from lessening the role of the Abilene who can't shoot straight character and making Dona Speir the lead, as it wasn't this movie, but the next one, Savage Beach. I think I've mentioned this before, but that run by Speir in her seven Sidaris films has to put her up there as one of the greatest female action leads. When you look at some of the names people generally throw out there like Milla Jovovich and Angelina Jolie, she's right up there with the number of credits, and she was doing it before them. For me I might have her top five, after Pam Grier, Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, and Zoe Saldana. After Speir I'd have names like Michelle Rodriguez, Jovovich, Jolie, etc. Yes, these movies are a lot of fun, and have a lot of T n' A, but that shouldn't diminish from what Speir was doing here and her role as an all-time action lead.

Obregon's hatchet men were played by Keith Cooke and Bruce Penhall. For Cooke, this was his first role before he jumps into Rothrock's China O'Brien series as Dakota. He also used his birth surname here, Hirabayashi--Cooke is his mother's maiden name. He doesn't do any martial arts in this, which is kind of too bad, considering Harold Diamond is in this, I'd love to have seen them get after it. Penhall of course would come to be known for these films, but in this first of the 8 he did, he plays a baddie. It's like the Fast and Furious movies where the baddies join the good guys in later films, only instead of the mental gymnastics required to believe that after Jason Statham's character was trying to murder Vin Diesel that that would suddenly be water under the bridge; here Sidaris just has Penhall play different characters, first Bruce Christian in the Speir films, and then Chris Cannon when the series shifts to being led by Julie Strain.

This is our second Harold Diamond film on the site, the first being when we did Hard Ticket to Hawaii. He's a fascinating specimen of the late 80s/early 90s. The hair, the voice, the shirts and jumpsuits that absolutely must be worn open, it all works so much on that level; but at the same time, he's a great martial artist, which makes him a lot of fun to watch. Especially good here was his fight scene with Dennis Alexio, which Diamond choreographed. Looking at his IMDb bio, he hasn't done much. He has 10 credits, but as far as what we'd do here, he has these two Sidaris movies, two Amir Shervan films, a Zagarino actioner, and then in 2017 he was in an Asylum joint, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, where he plays Merlin. Interestingly enough, that was going to be the film I was going to do for their DTVC Hall of Fame induction post, not knowing Diamond was in it, but I opted for Fast and Fierce: Death Race instead after I fell behind and didn't end up doing their post until the May after. Now knowing it has Diamond makes it more intriguing.

Finally, this movie has something in common with another film released the same year, The Secret of King Mahi's Island, they both have explosives attached to a boomerang used as a weapon. Unlike the Daniels flick that uses it to blow up a helicopter, in this it's used to blow up Penhall. Was this a case of polygenesis, or was there an explosive boomerang that predated these movies as the inspiration? I thought maybe a Bond movie I've never seen may have done it, but I couldn't find anything. Also there was the DC baddie Captain Boomerang, who employed explosive boomerangs. Could Sidaris and one of the writers of The Secret of King Mahi's Island have been into comics and liked the idea of that? One element of this movie that I'm pretty sure was sui generis, was the use of Chekhov's Pacemaker. In the opening of the film we find out that baddie John Aprea has a pacemaker, and as we know, you can't mention that a character has a pacemaker in the opening unless you plan to use it at the end, which Sidaris does. How he does is another stroke of brilliance: a homing missile launched from a modified crutch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, this is available to stream free here in the US on Tubi. Take advantage of it while you can, because last year these were all taken down. At that time, when they were all available, I watched all 12 in preparation of my podcast episode with Mitch, so when Letterboxd told me who my most watched director and actor of the year were, I got Sidaris and Obregon. So far this year Sidaris is behind Scorsese for me, 4 to 2; but Obregon is way behind guys like Adkins, Dolph, Zagarino, and Hues, especially after I did a bunch of their movies in anticipation of podcast episodes on them. It looks like I need to binge another complete series to get them both back up there.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095867

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