It’s a Hard Ticket To Hawaiiii-iii
It’s not paradise all the time
It’s a Hard Ticket To Hawaiiii-iii
Although its like a dream, it’s not what it seems

Good god, I love TCM Underground. I never, ever, get to write about awesome films like this one being on a channel like Turner Classic Movies.

Andy Sidaris was an 80s filmmaker whose belief seemed to be that no film could be terrible as long as there was a lot of nudity and violence to go around. Based on the two titles his DVD collection has been released under – “Girls, Guns, and G-Strings” and “Bullets, Bombs, and Babes” (alliteration is always appropriate) – it’s fairly obvious what you’ll see in all 12 of the titles collected. But, the Sidaris are no ordinary films. These are all-80s all-out films that believe in the maxim “Go Big or Go Home.”

The plots of the Sidaris films are usually flimsy excuses to string together a bunch of set pieces. Here, it’s some nonsense about the Drug Enforcement Agency, running under the front of a cargo delivery company, intercepting a bunch of diamonds from some drug lord and its an all out fight to get the diamonds back. How this plot plays out depends on the director. John Woo would have a bunch of Mexican standoffs and slow-mo bullet ballets while sending doves flying into the air. Michael Bay would have a buddy cop action movie with flashy car chases. Andy Sidaris eschews what we normally expect, and gives us gonzo.

The most famous clip from Hard Ticket to Hawaii involves an assassin doing a handstand on his skateboard, a blow-up sex doll, and a bazooka. These pieces all sort of domino into each other in a mind-bending way that makes you reconsider all the expectations you’ve ever had about logic and cinema. Do you really want your movies to be emotionally enriching adventures that bring you closer to humanity? Or, would you rather see a muscle guy in a thong chop somebody’s fingers off with a frisbee? These are the serious life decisions that you have to make.

Like many cult movies, the films of Andy Sidaris reward the patient and the observant. It may not be paced like a John Woo or Michael Bay film, but it frequently pays off in spades. When was the last movie that had two blonde former Playboy playmates starring as DEA agents who fly prop planes for a cargo company that also takes tourists on sight-seeing Hawaiian tours while practicing their skills with nunchaku? That’s just the scene with the titular song!

The acting may be wonderfully stilted, the dialogue may be cheesy (“Let’s hit the jacuzzi, I do my best thinking in there”), and the movie may be an exploitative mess of political incorrectness (the women get to said Jacuzzi to deliver an important plot point before leaving all without actually turning on the Jacuzzi itself)…but it is a lot of fun. In a way, it’s just a few steps separate from the sweded films of Be Kind, Rewind; there’s a low budget energy that feels like a campy good time more than a cynical exercise of calculated schlock.

Hard Ticket To Hawaii airs Saturday night/Sunday morning on Turner Classic Movies (yes, really!) at 4:45amEST