R.J. “Hurricane” Spencer (Hulk Hogan) is a former Navy SEAL who now lives in Florida and makes his living with his superboat, Thunder. Spencer’s best friend, Bru (Chris Lemmon), is also his business partner. There’s nothing that Spencer and Bru can’t do. This movie starts with Spencer taking the boat down to Cuba so he can rescue the family of a dissident and bring them back to Florida. It ends with his using his boat to save the lives of his wife (Felicity Waterman) and his stepdaughter (Robin Weisman) from some treasure hunters who have made the mistake of kidnapping them. Spencer’s marriage is one of convenience. His wife needed a husband to get her fortune and he needed a rich wife to keep his business going. His father-in-law (Patrick MacNee) doesn’t trust him but Spencer’s a top-notch American hero.
Though it was initially released direct-to-video, Thunder in Paradise was actually a pilot for a syndicated television show that started a few months later. Both the film and the show were from the producers of Baywatch and it shows with the emphasis on the beach, the bikinis, the corny humor, and the cartoonish villains (led, in this case, by Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones). Of course, it’s a Hulk Hogan movie so none of that is really a negative. Hogan might be playing Hurricane Spencer but he’s really playing himself and there’s enough self-aware humor to make Thunder In Paradise entertaining in a way that No Holds Barred definitely was not. (I liked that, during a fight on another boat, there just happened to be a wooden chair sitting on the deck that Hogan could break across his opponent’s back.) Chris Lemmon and Hulk Hogan are a surprisingly good team (Lemmon’s brain provide a needed contrast to Hogan’s bawn) and Carol Alt is on-hand as the owner of a beach bar. Naturally, a handful of Hogan’s fellow wrestlers shows up as well, Brutus Beefcake, Jim “The Anvil” Neidhardt, Giant Gonzalez, Jimmy Hart, and others. As a fan of The Avengers, I was happy to see Patrick MacNee, even if his character was just a typical distrustful father-in-law.
Corny, silly, dumb, and more fun than it probably should be, Thunder In Paradise is an entertaining product of its time.
