Hard Ticket to Hawaii

1987 "Pay the price for paradise!"
5| 1h36m| R| en
Details

A Molokai-based civilian pilot and an undercover DEA agent intercept a delivery of diamonds intended for druglord Seth Romero. Seth, his henchmen, and other island undesirables launch a full-scale assault on the duo. If they're going to survive, they'll need the help of agent Rowdy Abilene and his partner/kickboxing expert Jade.

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Reviews

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen
Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.
Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.
Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Red-Barracuda With Hard Ticket to Hawaii, writer/director Andy Sidaris truly laid down the template he would forever follow. It wasn't his first movie, that was Malibu Express (1985), but that one unusually had a detective narrative and male lead. Of course, it also had lots of pleasingly excessive nudity involving a selection of busty beauties. Sidaris retained that latter element but refocused the plot where the protagonists were hot female action heroines. And so with Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Sidaris created his babes, bullets and explosions sub-genre. The story has two very hot women operate an airplane cargo delivery service in Hawaii. A large, toxic snake they are delivering escapes and they get mixed up in a scheme involving criminals and a cache of diamonds. Much entertainment follows.I've seen all the Sidaris movies and I can say with some certainty that the aforementioned first two films in his filmography are his very best. And Hard Ticket to Hawaii is definitely his ultimate classic. It has all the elements of all his other films but it has more. Like the others, it's an action flick with the great idea of predominantly featuring 80's Playmates and it also has a commendable focus on beautiful breasts, with lots of somewhat basic acting and ropey dialogue to top things off. It even features some stalwarts of future Sidaris movies such as the gorgeous trio of Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton and Cynthia Brimhall, plus the acting colossus that is Rodrigo Obregon. And yet, it's the extra details that we have on top of this that elevate this one into classic status.For a start, there are just more interesting things going on. Where most Sidaris movies have pretty forgettable plot-lines, this one sticks in the mind. We have a fairly routine bad guys versus good guys set-up but running alongside this there is the plot strand about the monstrous snake made toxic by infection by cancerous rats. Its pure psychotronic nonsense of the first order of course but quite brilliantly entertaining nonsense. We also have a transvestite hit-man, a skateboarding assassin with inflatable doll, a female bodybuilder interrogator, a razor-tipped Frisbee and a finale so hilariously over-the-top, it's frankly genius. The latter involves, amongst other things, a ludicrously over-extended death scene, a snake bursting out of a toilet, a bazooka and a motorbike crashing through a wall. If you can't enjoy this I feel sorry for you. And plus points have to automatically be given to any film where two beautiful women declare that they 'do their best thinking in the hot tub'. I like too how, despite celebrating their bodies, in Sidaris movies the women are always portrayed as resourceful and kick-ass and never dumb.This is the one truly must-see Sidaris film. It feels like he threw everything at it and just added every idea he came up with regardless of how insane it was. He never really topped it ever again but then no one else has ever made a film of this particular type any better either. One of the all-time great 80's b-movies.
Dave from Ottawa ... but here goes anyway. Andy Sidaris has no more directorial sense than Ed Wood, and not much more money, but like Ed Wood, he never let a shortage of cash or talent keep him out of the director's chair. Like all of his movies, HTTH plays like low rent T&A version of Chips or some other bad 70s TV action show, but with worse acting and dialogue, shoddier action sequence construction and painfully cheap explosion effects. For instance, when a chopper blows up halfway through, the model looks so fake you can practically read 'Fisher-Price' on the bottom. And the plot-line seems like a random assemblage of action bits pulled off a dartboard, which it probably was. Sidaris works so fast and slap-dash, he makes Jesse Franco look like Steven Spielberg. I may have spent more time dashing off this review than Andy spent on HTTH's script. Nevertheless, he knows what his audience wants: bouncy Playmates showing off a lot of skin while shooting it out with bad guys, and he delivers the goods. You have to give the guy credit for truth in advertising if nothing else.
BA_Harrison I suspect that the bulk of my review for any Andy Sidaris movie will sound something like this: big boobs... blah blah blah.... guns... blah blah blah.... great ass... shower scene... blah blah blah.... jacuzzi... blah blah blah (which will save me a fair amount of time at the keyboard, I suppose). While this all sounds well and good, I'm only two movies into my 12-film Girls, Guns and G-Strings box set, and I'm already finding Sidaris's initially promising formula of big breasted babes, bullets and bad guys extremely hard work thanks to the the uninspired scripts and pedestrian direction.Hard Ticket To Hawaii actually proves even more tedious than its predecessor Malibu Express, with a weaker plot (hard to imagine such a thing is possible, but here it is) and less sex (although, admittedly, still plenty of nudity from a bevy of hard-bodied babes); even the film's sillier scenes—a skateboarding assassin and his blow up sex-doll being shot out of the sky by a bazooka, a bad guy killed by a razor-edged frisbee, and a snake infected with toxins from cancer infested rats bursting out from a toilet bowl—are so poorly realised that they fail to make this anything but a massive B-movie bore, albeit one with great tits and ass.3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.
unbrokenmetal Even though the Malibu Express yacht returns, this is not a real sequel to the movie "Malibu Express". Dona Speir starred for the first time in one of Sidaris' movies; tough guy Rodrigo Obregon and Playboy playmate Cynthia Brimhall would become familiar faces in the series of action movies with lethal ladies, too. "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" begins with two female pilots who carry an extremely dangerous snake on board of their plane. The snake escapes and spreads death, but the two ladies are also in danger because they interfered unknowingly with the plans of diamond smugglers. The movie suffers from a mediocre story, silly dialogs and poor acting, but with a lot of action and the fine craftsmanship behind the camera, it becomes easy to sit through. This is the 2nd out of my 12 reviews for the works of Andy Sidaris, in chronological order. Even if "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" isn't among my personal faves, I have the impression that due to the learning experience from this, some of the following works became much better.