It’s a happy song but kind of a disturbing video.
What exactly is happening in this video? I’ll leave that for you to interpret. All I’ll say is that it reminds me of my favorite movie about cults, Ticket to Heaven.
Then again, if you can remain happy after slipping in a pool of blood then you’ve obviously achieved something.
Enjoy!
So, imagine this.
You and your BFF are at a luau in Hawaii. Fires are being spun. People are dancing. Drums are being beaten. It’s almost time to eat the pig and suddenly, you discover that a mysterious old man wants to speak to you. The man is surrounded by armed guards but you’re used to that. Both you and your BFF work for the government. You blow things up and save the world for a living!
Anyway, the old man informs you that he is a master criminal named Kane. He’s one of those “I’m going to take over the world” types but apparently, you keep thwarting his plans. He’s a little bit upset about that and why not? It’s hard enough trying to conquer the world without having somebody continually blowing up all of your friends. He says that he’s going to have you killed.
Uh-oh!
But fear not! Kane isn’t going to kill you right there and then. It turns out that Kane has a code of honor that he lives by. He may be evil but he believes in fair play. So, Kane says that he’s going to kill you later. Apparently, he’s hired six different teams of assassins. Over the next couple of days, they’re going to try to kill you. Fortunately, the team’s aren’t going to work together or anything intelligent like that. That wouldn’t be fair. Instead, they’re going to come at you one at a time. Once one teams fails to kill you, they’re out of the hunt.
How would you react? What would be the first thing that you and your BFF would do?
Would you make sure your guns were loaded, lock the doors, and then wait for the first team to make their move?
Would you try to make the first move, maybe trying to take out Kane right then and there?
Or maybe you would leave the country and try to start a whole new life under a new identity?
I’d probably go with the third option but that’s not what Donna (Dona Speir) and Nicole (Roberta Vasquez) do when Kane (Pat Morita) tells them that they’ve been targeted. Instead, they get topless and relax in the hut tub while discussing how much it sucks that someone wants to kill them.
Honestly, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The 1991 film, Do or Die, was directed by Andy Sidaris. In a Sidaris film, a topless hot tub party plays much the same role as the family get togethers that often end the Fast and the Furious movies. Still, it’s hard not to be a little bit disappointed by their sudden passivity. After all, Donna is the same agent who previously used a rocket launcher to blow up Erik Estrada at the end of Guns.
Speaking of Erik Estrada, he’s back. However, he’s playing a different character than he played in Guns. Now, he’s a heroic agent named Rico. When Donna and Nicole finally get around to letting their boss, Lucas (William Bumiller), know what’s going on, Lucas recruits Rico to help protect them. Bruce Christian (Bruce Penhall) and Shane Abilene (Michael Shane) are also brought in as well. Shane still has terrible aim. I know that’s a running joke in all of the Sidaris films but you really do have to wonder why the government continues to employ someone who sucks at a huge part of his job.
Anyway, Donna and Nicole eventually head for the mainland but that doesn’t do much good because Kane put a tracking device on her watch and Donna apparently lost several IQ points between the end of Guns and the start of this movie. At first, they go to Vegas but eventually, they end up in Louisiana. This leads to the usual remote-controlled boats and helicopters, the same ones that appear in nearly every Sidaris film. Needless to say, a lot of stuff gets blown up.
And it’s all pretty boring, to be honest. It sounds like it should be fun, what with all the different assassins showing up and Kane getting more and more frustrated as Donna and Nicole continue to survive. But, unfortunately, none of the assassins are that interesting. Most of the film takes place in Caddo Parish. My family lived in Shreveport for a year and a half. I like Caddo Parish. But it really can’t compare to Hawaii as far as photogenic locations are concerned.
Do or Die had potential but it got lost in the hot tub.
Having survived his creator’s attempt to kill him off at the end of From Russia With Love, British secret agent James Bond returned in the 1958 novel Dr. No.
When Dr. No begins, M is concerned that his top agent might no longer have what it takes. After all, James Bond barely survived his previous mission. The doctors say that he’s recovered, Bond has spent months in rehab. Bond is desperate for a new mission but M still has his doubts. So, he gives Bond what should be an easy assignment. He sends 007 to Jamaica, to investigate the strange disappearance of John Strangeways and his secretary. (Strangeways previously appeared in Live and Let Die.)
It turns out to be anything but simple. As soon as Bond arrives, it becomes obvious that the mysterious Dr. No was somehow involved in whatever happened to Strangeways. Dr. No lives on a remote island and has made a fortune through the cultivation of bat guano. (Eck!) With the help of the loyal Quarrel and the beautiful Honeychile Ryder, Bond sets out to find out what Dr. No is actually up to. Of course, the natives say that Dr. No is protected by a dragon. Bond says that’s foolish but then the dragon shows up…
But it’s not just the dragon that Bond has to look out for! There’s Dr. No himself. When we finally meet Dr. No, we discover that he’s basically a cyborg. Oh, he’s never called that, of course. I don’t even know if “cyborg” was a word in 1958. But Fleming delights in telling us about Dr. No’s metal hands and the way that he glides across the floor. Fleming also delights in telling us all about the ins and outs of bat guano. Fleming came up with many creative deaths for his Bond novels but Dr. No is the first to feature suffocation by bat shit.
Dr. No is a departure from Fleming’s previous books, all of which may have featured villains with odd names but, at the same time, remained somewhat realistic. Dr. No, on the other hand, is so fanciful that it almost reads as being satire. Everything from Dr. No’s megalomania to Honeychile Ryder’s first appearance on the beach suggests that Dr. No is intentionally written to take place in a bigger-than-life fantasy world. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad book. In fact, it’s one of Fleming’s more entertaining novels. But it’s almost as if, having brought Bond back to life, Fleming was determined to take a break from the real world with his next novel.
Interestingly, Dr. No started life as a non-Bond related screenplay. Though Fleming ultimately abandoned the script, he used it as the inspiration for his next book. It’s appropriate that, from such beginnings, Dr. No went on to serve as the basis of the first Bond film.
Afrojack vs. Thirty Seconds to Mars?
Well, Thirty Seconds To Mars has Jared Leto. But Afrojack is Afrojack. My money has to be on the guy who didn’t appear in the worst movie to come out of the DCEU so far.
Anyway, enjoy!
As you can probably tell by looking at the poster at the top of this review, the 1990 film Guns was Andy Sidaris’s attempt to make a Bond film. Not only does the poster feature a man in a tuxedo and two gun-wielding women but the tag line even reads, “James Never Had This Kind of Help!”
(Of course, that’s not really true, as anyone who has seen Dr. No, Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, or For Your Eyes Only can tell you.)
Much like a Bond film, Guns features a secret agent fighting to defeat an international conspiracy. The agent’s efforts lead her and her allies to several different cities in several different … well, really only one country. Being a Sidaris film, it’s doubtful the Guns really had the budget to film anyplace other than the United States but still, the action does move from Lake Huvasa, Arizona to Hawaii to Las Vegas. That’s about as close as a Sidaris film ever gets to featuring exotic locations.
(If Lake Havusa sounds familiar, that’s because Jimmy Kimmel gave away at trip to Lake Havusa during the Oscars.)
And like any good Bond film, Guns has a flamboyant and almost comically evil villain. Juan “Jack of Diamonds” Degas (telenovela star and future reality tv mainstay Erik Estrada) is an international gun dealer and an all-around sociopath. He’s the type who shoots someone and then smirks about it. He’s so evil that he’s even got Danny Tejo working as his main henchman! That’s really evil! Estrada gives a surprisingly good performance in the role. Especially when compared to the forgettable villains who appeared in Sidaris’s previous films, Juan Degas feels like a worthy opponent. It’s not just that he’s evil. It’s that he’s so damn smug about it. You can’t wait to see him get taken down.
Degas is planning on smuggling a bunch of Chinese weapons into America through a base on Hawaii. The only problem is that Donna (Dona Speir) and her new partner, Nicole Justin (Roberta Vasquez), are based in Hawaii! Degas knows that he has to get rid of them if he’s going to have any hope of succeeding. (For whatever reason, it never occurs to Degas to smuggle the weapons through Guam or American Samoa. I mean, there are other islands out there.) When Degas sends two cross-dressing assassins to kill Nicole, they end up not only shooting the wrong woman but also killing a friend of Dona’s as well.
Now, it’s personal!
Except, it was already personal. In a typical example of Sidaris’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along style of plotting, it turns out that Degas previously killed Donna’s father. And now, it appears that it might get even more personal because Degas has kidnapped the Attorney General of Nevada, who happens to be Donna’s mother!
Obviously, this means that it’s time to gather together another group of misfit agents and take down the bad guys. That means that Savage Beach‘s Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane) and Bruce Christian (Bruce Penhall) both show up again. It also means that a lovable magician named Abe (Chuck McCann) gets to help out as well. Unfortunately, one member of the team is eventually blown up by a remote control boat.
That’s right! A remote control boat! For some reason, remote control vehicles were a Sidaris obsession and it’s not a Sidaris film without someone getting blown by either a remote control boat or helicopter.
Anyway, there’s a lot of explosions to be found in Guns but the good thing is that it’s women blowing stuff up and it’s women who are in charge of the entire operation. That’s the thing with a Sidaris film like this one. For all of the nudity and the double entendre-filled dialogue, Guns was an action film where women got to shoot the guns, beat up the bad guys, and ultimately save the world from a smirking misogynist. When Donna picked up that rocket launcher, it was both ludicrous and empowering at the same time.
Guns is one of Sidaris’s better films. For once, despite all of the usual Sidaris red herrings, the plot can actually be followed and Estrada is an appropriately hissable villain. While the film may not be able to compete with the best of the Bond films, it’s still more fun that SPECTRE.
(MAJOR SPOILERS)
First published in 1957, the fifth James Bond novel was nearly the last. Despite the success of the previous books, Ian Fleming was growing tired of the yearly obligation of coming up with a new adventure for James Bond. His health failing and his marriage strained, Fleming wrote to his friend Raymond Chandler, “My muse is in a very bad way … I am getting fed up with Bond and it has been very difficult to make him go through his tawdry tricks.”
Perhaps that’s why From Russia With Love could have easily been retitled “The Death of James Bond.”
In fact, the promise of death hangs over every paragraph of From Russia With Love. Bond doesn’t even make a personal appearance until halfway through the book. Up until that point, we spend our time with the men and the women who are plotting his death. The Russians not only want to kill Bond but they want to do so in a way that will embarrass the British secret service. What better scheme than to use the naive Tatiana Romanova to entice Bond and get Bond to lower his guard long enough to be killed by their top assassin, the sociopathic Red Grant?
Indeed, From Russia With Love is unique among the Bond books in that the reader spends almost the entire book a few steps ahead of Bond. While Bond thinks that he is helping Tatiana defect to the West, we’re aware that Red Grant is waiting just around the corner. And while Bond is often unsure about whether Tatiana is really in love with him, we know that she is but we also know that the Russians consider her to be expendable.
Up until the final few chapters, Bond is almost as passive a character in From Russia With Love as he was in Casino Royale. When he arrives in Turkey to investigate Tatiana, he spends most of his time being led around by the older Darko Kerim. Much as in Casino Royale, Bond is a bit of a student, one who is briefly disturbed when Kerim ruthlessly assassinates an enemy agent. Kerim is one of Fleming’s best creations, an outspoken spymaster who is so full of life that he often overshadows Bond. It’s only when Kerim is dead that Bond can step up into his usual heroic role.
Throughout the book, Fleming appears to be fascinated by everyone but James Bond. However, the change-of-pace actually works out surprisingly well. Grant, Tatiana, Kerim, and the dangerous Major Rosa Klebb are such memorably drawn characters that it doesn’t matter that Bond spends most of the book in the background. More than being a good Bond novel, it’s a genuinely exciting thriller.
And then there’s that ending. After originally ending with Bond and Tatiana going off on a typical Bondian jaunt, Fleming revised the book’s conclusion. Now, the book ended rather abruptly with Bond, having been poisoned by Major Klebb, crashing to the floor. If you ignore the fact that you’re reading a James Bond novel then it’s obvious that the Russians have succeeded in assassinating MI6’s best agent. That may have been Fleming’s intention but, of course, that’s not the way things turned out. Instead, Bond would return a year later in Dr. No.
And why not? From Russia With Love was the best Bond novel up to that point. (I consider it to be the second best of Fleming’s Bond novels, behind On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) Fleming may have been growing bored with Bond but readers? They loved him.
Up next: Bond gets strange with Dr. No!
Apparently, “think of England” is the advice that was once given to British wives who no longer enjoyed having sex with their husband, that one should simply lie back and “think of England.” Apparently, thinking of France would lead to divorce.
Yeah, this isn’t a particularly happy song. But it sounds nice and I enjoy the bleakness of the video’s black-and-white cinematography.
Enjoy!
1989’s Savage Beach is yet another Andy Sidaris film that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
This time, Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton) have been hired to perform a very important mission. You may remember that Donna works for a super secret government agency while, at one point, Taryn was in the witness protection program. As a part of their cover, they fly a plane in Hawaii, making deliveries and giving tours.
(To be honest, you would think that, after everything that happened in Hard Ticket To Hawaii and Picasso Trigger, their cover would have blown but apparently not.)
Anyway, this time, they’ve been hired to fly a very important vaccine to a nearby island. They manage to deliver the vaccine but a huge storm has come up. As soon as they get back in their plane and start back towards Hawaii, Donna says, “Shouldn’t we get out of these wet clothes?” While usually I roll my eyes at all of the nudity in Sidaris’s films, I have to admit that line made me laugh out loud. Maybe it was just the sincerity with which Dona Speir delivered it. Or maybe it’s just the fact that Andy Sidaris actually sat down, thought up that line, wrote it down, and then directed someone saying it. One thing that can definitely be said for Andy Sidaris: as a filmmaker, he was totally without shame.
Anyway, the storm gets really bad and Donna and Taryn end up crashing on what they think is a deserted island. Neither of them appear to be too upset about being stranded on that island, perhaps because Savage Beach was filmed nearly two decade before Lost. Make no doubt about it, Donna and Taryn are optimists!
It turns out that they’re not alone. Apparently, there’s treasure buried on the island and, as a result, all sorts of people are showing up. Most of them are villainous. Some of them are heroic. There’s even another Abilene cousin, Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane). Everyone wants that treasure. Everyone except for … THE WARRIOR!
Who is the Warrior (Michael Mikasa)? He was a soldier in the Japanese army during World War II. Left behind on the island, he’s still fighting the war. Or something. Actually, it’s not always easy to understand what the Warrior or anyone else is doing on the island. The Warrior does decide to protect Donna and Taryn and both of them try to keep his existence a secret from the rest of the people on the island but that doesn’t really work out.
Honestly, Savage Beach should not have been as complicated as it was. It should have been a simple story where Donna and Taryn outwitted a bunch of pirates on a desert island. Instead, more and more people just keep showing up on that beach. Good luck trying to keep them all straight.
It’s probably unnecessary to say that Savage Beach was a mess. I think “mess” is probably one of the words most commonly used in any review of an Andy Sidaris film. However, like most Sidaris films, the whole thing is too good-natured to really dislike. In fact, the plot is so incoherent that it actually becomes strangely fascinating.
Add to that, as a result of watching Savage Beach, I now know that you can safely undress and fly a plane at the same time. If I ever get my pilot’s license, I’ll be sure to remember that!
(SPOILERS FOR BOTH DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER AND FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE)
First published in 1956, Diamonds are Forever was the fourth of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels.
This time, Bond has been assigned to investigate international diamond smuggling. After assuming the identity of a burglar named Peter Franks, Bond infiltrates a smuggler’s ring. His investigation leads him back to the United States and into the untamed city of Las Vegas.
Diamonds are Forever is one of the weaker of Fleming’s Bond novels. Reportedly, it didn’t take long for Fleming to grow weary of the demands of coming up with a new Bond novel every year and he even considered killing off the British secret agent all together. As opposed to the first three books, the plot of Diamonds are Forever often feels rather hastily mashed together. Worst of all, Diamonds are Forever features the least memorable villains of the series, the Spang Brothers. The Spang Brothers are mobsters who talk like they’re in a bad crime movie and that’s about it. Certainly, they never come across like a legitimate threat to James Bond.
Probably the best thing about Diamonds are Forever is Bond’s growing relationship with the tough and cynical smuggler, Tiffany Case. More so than Vesper, Solitaire, and even Gala Brand, Tiffany seems like Bond’s equal and it’s no surprise when, at the end of the book, she and Bond end up moving in with each other.
(It’s also not a shock when, in the next novel, we learn that Tiffany soon left Bond for another man. Tiffany’s not the type to get tied down.)
It’s also interesting to read Fleming’s thoughts on Las Vegas. Remember how much Fleming hated on Florida in Live and Let Die? That’s nothing compared to what he does to Las Vegas. Reading his description of the famed gambling mecca, one gets the feeling that Fleming was both fascinated and disgusted by this quintessentially American city.
Finally, an entire chapter is devoted to Bond’s experience flying from the UK to the US. That may seem like filler to modern audiences. But you have to remember that Diamonds Are Forever was written at a time when commercial air travel was considered to be something of a luxury. For many readers in 1956, reading that chapter was probably as close to flying as they’d ever get.
Diamonds are Forever may be one of the weaker Bond novels but it was followed by one of the best, From Russia With Love!
I can never hear MakeDamnSure without thinking about the What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost episode of Degrassi.
That’s the episode where aspiring rock star Craig Manning (played by Jake Epstein) returns to Toronto after being on tour and we discover that he’s picked up a nasty cocaine habit. Despite being coked out of his mind, Craig still gets a chance to perform during a Taking Back Sunday show. However, no sooner does Craig get on stage and start to sing then he suddenly gets the worst nosebleed in the history of nosebleeds.
AGCK!
Needless to say, the members of Taking Back Sunday are not impressed.
Of course, before everything went so terribly wrong, Craig had bragged to Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara about how he performed a “stripped down, acoustic” version of MakeDamnSure in his set. “I’d like to hear that,” Adam replied.
YOU BLEW IT, CRAIG!
Oh well. Fear not. By the time Craig returned for Degrassi Goes Hollywood, he was clean of the drugs and hopefully, he got back together with Ellie.
(Actually, as much as I love Ellie, Craig’s soulmate really was Ashley. Ellie should never have let Sean break up with her…)
(Okay, sorry, I’m getting lost in a Degrassi tangent here…FOCUS, LISA, FOCUS!)
As for the video for MakeDamnSure, it features the band performing in a wind tunnel. There’s a lot of scary and sad imagery but fear not, things work out for the best. It turns out that some people do give a damn.
Enjoy!
