Thread by @aaronreynolds

Just having a conversation with @viss about terrible films that we love and I brought up Andy Sidaris. I’d like to share the cinema of Andy Sidaris with all of you right now.

My first exposure to Andy Sidaris was a one AM broadcast of Hard Ticket To Hawaii on CityTV, which back in the day was a funky independent station with generally good taste in movies. I fell asleep halfway through, and the next morning was convinced I had hallucinated it.

This film had everything: motorcycle stunts, machine guns, karate, things blowing up, airplanes, and a killer snake on the loose.

It had high-cheese dad-joke dialogue. It had mullets. It had a frisbee lined with razor blades as a murder weapon.

It also had such a loose grasp on its own plot that it never seemed to be sure if the villains were smuggling drugs or diamonds.

One day I was in a mall video rental store, an independent. They had a copy of Hard Ticket To Hawaii on their shelf. I spent half an hour convincing the clerk to sell it to me. “Come on, when was the last time someone rented it,” I asked.

Five years previous, it turns out.

It was as insane as I remembered. The snake subplot was so far removed from the rest of the film that it only intersected with the main plot during the opening credits and in the last five minutes. Imagine a film that keeps cutting away to random people being killed by a snake.

I then discovered that Hard Ticket To Hawaii is, in fact, a sequel. This did explain why I didn’t understand the relationships between the characters the way the film acted like I should. And it turns out that Sidaris made at least a dozen films just like it.

All of the films had:

Machine guns
Remote controlled cars
Explosions
Karate

They were also all set it Hawaii. “Guy must be Hawaiian,” I thought.

I became a fan of Andy Sidaris.

A decade later and now in the age of the internet, I went to Andy Sidaris’ IMDB page to see if there were any treasures for me to seek out that I had missed. I discovered that he had passed away.

I went to his website, found the “email us” link, and sent an appreciation.

I got the most wonderful reply from Arlene Sidaris, Andy’s widow, thanking me for sharing that I had enjoyed Andy’s work, and then giving me a huge piece of context for it that blew my mind.

Andy Sidaris, maker of these hilarious, over the top, somewhat inept action films, had seven Emmy awards.

Andy Sidaris was one of the most influential television directors of the 20th century.

Turns out that Andy Sidaris developed a lot of what we take for granted today in the coverage of sports on television. He won Emmys for directing Monday Night Football and the Olympics.

These nutty action films? These were his retirement. He would go to Hawaii every year with a group of soap opera stars, karate champions, and Playboy playmates, and make another film designed at first to be the 1AM third film at the drive-in, and later for late night cable.

Between 1985 and 1998, instead of joining a model train club or taking up birdwatching, Andy Sidaris went out and made action movies to entertain himself.

So if you ever want to see films that are ludicrous, make little sense, and that editorially have a rule about the maximum number of minutes that can pass without an explosion (REALLY, HE HAD A RULE), but that are also astonishingly technically competent, check out Andy Sidaris.

Here is the trailer for Hard Ticket To Hawaii.

Looks like Andy Sidaris’ YouTube channel uploaded all of his trailers about 12 years ago:

m.youtube.com/user/asidaris/…

This is the finale of Hard Ticket, where a murderous snake emerges from a toilet for literally no reason. Stay tuned for the final line.