Some movie cement their place in immortality by crafting a sublime experience that takes you to another world so completely that for a while at least, your own existence doesn’t exist. Some movies help you transcend space and time, where razor sharp direction and transformative performances combine with various artisans of their field to make us laugh, cry, scream and ponder the very nature of our own humanity.
And some films are Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
Cult worship can come from the most unlikely sources and most times you can find genuine art in the lesser seen movies that tend to bypass the populist glare of the masses, however at no point in the career of director Andy Sidaris do you think that art was what he was shooting for. However, in the realms of the so-bad-it’s-good movie, his 1987 epic, Hard Ticket To Hawaii has obtained legendary status among its acolytes primarily for being really, really shit. Join me now as we enter a world of sizzling babes, killer frisbees and a murderous snake with cancer to punch our ticket for a one way trip to bizarro world.
Meet Donna and Taryn, two blonde, busty, bodacious babes who spend their day waxing lyrical about which James Bond they’d prefer to fuck and doing their jobs at Molokai Cargo, flying deliveries all around Hawaii. However, while on the surface, these two bimbettes seem like Playmates in tiny shorts who have stumbled into a very strange job as things are not what they seem. You see, Donna is actually a secret operative working for The Agency and Taryn is her tag along partner who has recently obtained a new identity after a previous adventure and seems to be loving her new life of intrigue and air freight. However, when a small, harmless, local marijuana operation gets violently taken over by drug lord Seth Romero to help spread the criminal empire of ruthless Kingpin Mr. Chang, Donna and Taryn have to call in the chiseled physiques of fellow operatives Rowdy Abilene and Jade to help out.
This is where things start to get needlessly complicated. You see, after Donna and Taryn accidently intercepts a delivery of diamonds meant for Romero, they find themselves firmly on the criminals shitlist, which only gets cemented further when Donna later wounds the guy by shooting him in the face. Worse yet, the delivery of a live snake goes horrendously wrong when instead of loading the safe reptile onto their plane, they mistakenly take another snake that’s been rendered monstrously lethal due to it being infected with deadly toxins from cancer infected rats – easily done, I suppose.
With drug lords on their nicely shaped asses and a killer snake on the loose, Donna can Taryn hold out long enough until the cavalry arrives armed with rocket launchers, razor-lined throwing toys and more misogyny than the entire Internet combined?
There are many ways to try and explain what watching Hard Ticket To Hawaii feels like. One accurate description would be that it feels like a strangely horny fever dream with the attention span of a sugar infused goldfish. Another would be that this is what it would feel like if, midway through shooting a porno, the director suddenly decided to make a real movie instead and just swapped out the hardcore stuff (while keeping the nudity) and just replaced an loin-based explosions with real ones instead, but whatever emotions stirs in your regularly confounded brain, you’ll rarely be bored as Sidaris piles on the weirdly cheerful sleaze with enthusiastic effect. It also takes a special kind of film to make it all the way to the fifty minute mark with you still a state of confusion as you aren’t entirely sure what the plot actually is, but when spectacularly failing is this fun, who the hell cares.
Actually, there’s an argument to be made that Sidaris didn’t actually fail – because for all intents and purposes, Hard Ticket To Hawaii seems to be precisely the exact film the director intended it to be. I mean, no one puts in a scene where a skateboarding assassin clutching a blow up doll is rammed by jeep, only to have his tumbling body (and the sex toy) nuked in mid-air by a bazooka blast by accident, right? However, the way Sidaris brain works obviously isn’t on the same level as everyone else’s as Hard Ticket To Hawaii baffling plot somehow ends up being both aggressively complex, yet strangely aimless at the same time. From the little I could gather from the film itself, it’s a simple drug lords vs good guys flick the likes of which The Cannon Group remade constantly (usually with ninjas), but in Andy Sidaris’ world, all women are supremely hot with hair that contains far more volume than their arcs and are constantly “up for it” more than rutting rabbits.
Conversely, the dudes are either sculpted man-gods, or sweaty slobs – but both have exactly the same attitude to women as the throwback misogyny flies off the charts with such chat up lines as “Hey, you got a great ass!” and “You can sit here on my face.” being sold as the height of sophistication – but even when the movie is managing to pass the Bechdel Test by having two nude babes chatting in a hottub, the sheer level of horniness mix with an utter lack of focus proves to be weirdly hypnotic.
While most people would assume that bringing down a crazed drug lord would be ample enough plot to work with, Sidaris throws in distracting subplots that literally have nothing to do with anything. The most famous of these is the majestically ridiculous matter of an insanity-ridden super snake that’s gone on a rampage after being infected like cancer rats, and who goes off for adventures of its own presumably because it’s under impression it’s in a Jaws ripoff. Looking like a rubbery sock puppet that drools, it murders tourists, lurks round the island and explodes out of a toilet for a final reel shock that truly has to be seen to be believed. Elsewhere, a comedic subplot involving a TV producer desperately trying to get an interview nail is similarly flummoxing in that it has no baring on anything whatsoever; but then what do you expect from a script that concocts a painfully convoluted backstory for a henchman who takes ten minutes out of his shift everyday to throw a frisbee around, just so the heroes can trick him into slashing his own throat with a throwing disc lined with razor blades? And let’s not even get started on the drag wearing mole who’s been disguised as a female barmaid for fuck knows how long…
Not to get too technical with movie speak, but taken on its own terms, Hard Ticket To Hawaii is basically funny as fuck for all the wrong reasons – which, obviously then become the right reasons; and while, in my estimation, it may not quite reach the dizzy, awful/awesome heights of The Room, Revenge Of The Ninja, or Invasion USA, lovers of 80s trash will be in utter paradise. I mean, even though I’ve has concussions that have made more sense, how can you not love a film that has its villain utter the immortal phrase: “If brains were bullshit, you’d have a clean cage.” or comes complete with its own, nails down a blackboard, title song.
For best results, see with a deeply inebriated crowd as standard and let the camp wash over you like killer snake spit.
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