Hard Ticket to Hawaii

Hairspray, bare tits, and overblown action sequences are the order of the day in this oeuvre of Andy Sidaris, a former TV sports director who even won an Emmy for his coverage of the 1968 Olympics, until the home video revolution of the 1980s and a heureka moment of casting Playboy playmates as actresses gave him an opportunity to live out his dreams of being a real action film director. Honing in on a simple but effective formula he succinctly dubbed BBB (Bullets, Bombs, Babes), Sidaris’ 12 movies were very cheap, nonsensical, and borderline incompetent, but have a purity of purpose and a spark of demented genius that cannot be denied.

“Hard Ticket to Hawaii” from 1987 shines brightest among his craziness and serves as a great entry point to his colorful BBB repertoire. The plot here is both needlessly convoluted and non-existent at the same time but who cares. If blonde secret agents going over their daily debriefing topless in a bubblebath isn’t enough for you, there’s also plenty of exotic Hawaiian scenery, a ferociously funny contaminated snake on the loose, a razor-blade frisbee kill, remote control helicopters transporting diamonds, motorcycles flying through walls, and a skateboarding gunman taking cover behind a sex doll gets blown to pieces with a bazooka. Altogether, this triple B-movie is a perfect example of what made the 80s so damn… 80s. Tasteless, silly, shiny, loud and gratuitous.

Starring the real life Ken-doll from „The Bold and the Beautiful” Ronn Moss, Playboy playmates Dona Speir (March 1984) and Hope Marie Carlton (July 1985), and a variety of other simply attractive people kicking ass, blowing stuff up and doing sexy things romantically.

Restoration courtesy of Malibu Bay Films and the American Genre Film Archive.

Attention! In addition to the Estonian dubbing, the film also has English subtitles.