Awesomely Bad: Hard Ticket to Hawaii

You know a movie is going to be good when a former Playboy Playmate model (Dona Speir - Miss March 1984) invites a soap-opera star (Bold and the Beautiful’s Ronn Moss) to join her in the warm ocean waters and his reply is “I’ve got better things to do with my body temperature.” I mean really, you just don’t find good dialogue like that anymore. Oh yeah, and then they have sex. That’s how Hard Ticket to Hawaii starts. Hard Ticket is the first release (though not first to be filmed) in the 12-movie Triple B Collection, films predominantly written and directed by camp auteur Andy Sidaris. The three B’s in Triple B? - Bullets, Bombs, and Babes of course. Considering Hard Ticket is a cheesy action movie littered with a hand full of Playboy Playmates it manages to deliver all three with gusto.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii is a by-the-numbers action flick in which a very poorly explained ring of generic bad guys are guilty of something. The story is convoluted to the point of absurdity. Initially it seems the movie is about a generic group of drug dealers that have taken over what used to be a small, family-run pot growing operation on the small Hawaiian island of Molokai. Two cops stumble upon this newly subverted operation, which should be too small to really be of interest to a group of hard drug lords, and end up dying for their blunder. Now let’s add to this a poorly copied Jeremy Irons-ish mastermind with a bad English accent, even though played by legitimate Brit Peter Bromilow, who is smuggling a rather small amount of diamonds into Hawaii by way of remote controlled helicopter launched from his yacht and delivered to our new drug lord friends. This delivery of diamonds gets intercepted by supposedly undercover FBI agent Donna Hamilton, the aforementioned Playmate Dona Speir, and her sidekick Taryn who is a mob whistle-blower under witness protection, played by Hope Marie Carlton (Miss July 1985). If this weren’t enough, let’s add to this mix a vicious, man-eating, “contaminated” snake that gets loose on the island.

I have no idea where the snake storyline comes from; it makes no sense and adds absolutely nothing to the movie - but damn is it funny. The story behind the snake is that the Department of Health has shipped this snake, in a flimsy wood-slatted shipping crate, because it has been “infected by deadly toxins by cancer infested rats.” Why anyone would ship such a snake to Hawaii is beyond me. Even more so, why in a cheap see-thru slatted crate? The problem is that there is also a non-infected, perfectly normal snake that is supposed to be delivered to a nature ranch on Molokai. The inevitable slip-up sends the monstrous super snake to the tiny island via a small charter plain, inexplicably piloted by our undercover agent and witness-in-hiding, along with a honeymooning pair of tourists. The snake gets free when the drug lord and a pair of his thugs, one of whom is a scary female bodybuilder, show up at the undercover agents home, where witness and super spy wannabe Taryn is also staying, to recover the filched diamonds.

The snake makes a number of cameo appearances throughout the movie to terrorize the tiny islands inhabitants, and I suppose add a sense of danger to island life. It scares off the macho drug lord, ominously named Seth, just by sitting there, relatively far away from him. It eats the honeymooning couple (come on, you knew they weren’t gonna make it anyways). And even pops up, literally, in the final showdown between the good guys and the drug lords by bursting through the toilet in a foamy froth of green light, shattering the toilet as it goes. The snake is a badass however, as it takes several shots straight to the tongue, yes tongue, and only meets its match when blasted to bits by a 4-barreled rocket launcher that keeps popping up and getting fired in close-quarters. This 4-barreled rocket launcher is super-agent Rowdy’s favorite weapon, and supposedly the only one he can hit a moving target with, as he uses it to take out a skateboarder using a blow-up sex doll as a body shield (he also blows up the sex doll), an assassin hiding behind a Japanese paper screen, and even a helicopter (which, if you kept a tally, accounts for all four barrels).

Considering there are at least four Playmates in the movie it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a good bit of gratuitous nudity in the movie. With the exception of the very noticeably 80’s hairstyles, they’re all quite attractive and deliver their lines better than most of the men in the movie. So you can check off the Babes. The movie has enough of a budget to do some explosions and although the shootouts are ridiculous, they’re still shootouts so it covers the Bullets and I guess Bombs on the list as well. The movie has some brilliantly cheesy lines, such as “Man, he must be smoking some heavy doobies.” when the two male leads see the skateboarder, who will later come armed with blow-up doll, skating down the middle of the road while doing a handstand. When the agents realize there’s a rat in their midst, the cross-dressing identity of said rat is revealed when Agent Hamilton pulls of some CSI Miami bullshit saying “I recognized the cigarette in his left hand and his pinky-ring.” And apparently it’s someone’s idea of sexy pillow talk to say “All I wanna do is suck the polish right off your toes.” And finally, how can you not like a movie that works its title into one of its cheesy original songs? “It’s a hard ticket to Hawaii; it’s not paradise all the time.”

Final Verdict: This movie is absolutely brilliant. It’s got a completely retarded story, with pointless subplots. It’s got horrible and hilarious dialogue. The acting is laughable in so many ways, though as I said the ladies did much better than their male counter parts. Hard Ticket to Hawaii is just loaded with so many fun things to laugh at and make fun of, and the best part of it is that it’s actually hard sometimes to tell if it’s intentional or not. Something that is actually very uncommon for straight up cheesy B-movies is bonus content on the DVD and this one actually delivers a directors commentary with Andy Sidaris and a behind the scenes featurette with Andy and B-move goddess Julie Strain (and yes, she shows her tits in it too). Hard Ticket to Hawaii is a must-own and gets my first 5/5 rating.