Bad Movie Club: Hard Ticket to Hawaii


1987 Andy Sidaris classic

Rating: 6/20 (Fred: 10/20; Josh: 10/20; Libby: 13/20; Johnny: 14/20; Jeremy: 131/20; Ozzy: no rating)

Plot: Two former FBI agents or current FBI agents or one FBI agent and one gal in witness protection (we couldn't figure it out) procure some diamonds while lounging on the titular 50th state, and the big drug kingpin who they belong to wants them back. Meanwhile, there's a cancer snake.

Do you like boobs? You do? Good. How about guns? Do you like guns? Yes? Well, then I have a director for you--Andy Sidaris who wrote and directed this dazzling piece of cinema, ostensibly when he was about 12 years old. There are three scenes in this movie that place this in a higher echelon of bad movies, but if you haven't seen this and are striving to become a bad movie aficionado, you should just go watch the movie right now. This is the kind of stuff that will have a greater impact if you go in blind. But here are those three scenes:

1) The good guys are driving along. They see a skateboarder, one of the bad guys in a "disguise" or something, standing on his hands on his board. They continue driving. The bad guy hops in the passenger seat of the car and they catch up and pass the good guys. The skateboarder then gets out of the car with the skateboard and a blow-up doll and skates toward the good guys while shooting his gun. He gets hit by the good guys' vehicle and goes flying into the air. One of the good guys pulls out his rocket launcher and fires twice, blowing up the bad guy and the sex doll.

2) The good guys have to get past a guard on the beach. His name's Shades because he wears sunglasses. They think they've found a weakness though--he and a girl play catch with a Frisbee every day. "I can use that," says one of the good guys. He constructs a weapon--a Frisbee with razor blades around the edges. He takes it to the beach and starts playing with Shades, a guy eager to show off his Frisbee catching and throwing skills. Then, the switch the the razor blade Frisbee! Shades loses fingers and gets a razor blade Frisbee in the side of his head.

3) That aforementioned cancer snake, near the climax of the movie, pops out of a toilet and starts attacking one of the women. The guy who we thought was the main bad guy but actually wasn't gets bitten several times, but he's invincible and therefore just fine. A bustle ensues. Enter: one good guy with, you guessed it, that rocket launcher. He aims at the snake and fires. The snake's head explodes.

References to James Bond, boobs, a bad guy who is either a cross-dresser or just disguising himself as a woman or both, an original song that used the title of the movie in its lyrics, boobs, another song with the title of the movie, a snake puppet, Chinese stars and nunchaku, more boobs, sexy time music featuring a Pan flute, an inconsequential football playing character named Jimmy John Jackson,  a scene which could be the textbook example of "gratuitous nudity," random sumo wrestlers, a snake photobomb, boobs, the following dialogue:

Girl: "Tell me--what do you feeeeeeeel?"
Guy: "One man's dream is another man's lunch."
Girl: "You son of a bitch."

Other fantastic pieces of writing: "If brains were bird shit, you'd have a clean cage." "In a pig's ass!" "Just when you thought it was safe to take a pee."

I apologize for this not making a lot of sense. This is what happens to me when my brain's overloaded with boobs and guns. But seriously, if you enjoy this sort of thing as much as I do, this one's going to be a hit. And you can bet that this won't be BMC's last Andy Sidaris movie.

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