Since the late 70s, the husband and wife team of Andy and Arlene Sidaris--she produces, he writes and directs--have been responsible for a series of low-budget action adventure pictures featuring Playboy Playmates and muscular young men in skimpy clothing, accessorized with high-tech
cars, planes and guns. The titles--SEVEN, MALIBU EXPRESS, HARD TICKET TO HAWAII, PICASSO TRIGGER and SAVAGE BEACH--are probably more familiar to people who watch a lot of pay-per-view movies in hotel rooms than they are to the average moviegoer.
The Sidarises' films are assembled according to a strict formula that mixes equal parts skin, explosions, chases over land, sea and air, and cornball humor. Most of the women have credits in films with such titles as H.O.T.S., NAKED CAGE, STREET ASYLUM and NAKED FORCE. Both men and women tend to
have athletics in their backgrounds. The films make no demands on their audience, and deliver what they promise: pretty people, pretty locations, pretty machinery and pretty thin plots.
International arms dealer Juan "Jack of Diamonds" Degas (Erik Estrada) wants to use the lovely Hawaiian island of Molokai as a refueling point for the planes in which he's smuggling state-of-the-art weapons from China to South America. But hot-to-trot federal agents Donna Hamilton (Dona Speir)
and Nicole Justin (Roberta Vasquez) are based on Molokai, so Degas devises a series of diversions he's sure will get them off his case. Hamilton, Justin and their hunky colleagues Bruce Christian (Bruce Penhall), Shane Abilene (Michael Shane) and Lucas (William Bumiller) team up to figure out
what's going on. Even with the help of busty agents Edy Stark (Cynthia Brimhall) and Ace (Liv Lindeland), they're led astray by Degas's devious machinations. Degas kidnaps Hamilton's mother, the Nevada attorney general, and forces a confrontation, during which Hamilton discovers that Degas--better
known as the Jack of Diamonds--also killed her father many years earlier. They face off, and agent Hamilton emerges the winner.
GUNS is very much in keeping with the Sidarises' earlier films. Stars Speir, Vasquez, Brimhall, Lindeland and Devin Devasquez (who plays Degas's girlfriend) are pretty and generously endowed. Shane and Penhall are muscular and handsome. Former television star Erik Estrada ("CHiPS") adds some name
recognition. The supporting cast includes character actors Chuck McCann (as an agent whose cover is a tacky magician's act) and tattooed Danny Trejo, former "Mr. Universe" John Brown and boxer-turned-actor ChuChu Malave.
Though there is a tremendous amount of mayhem, GUNS, like the rest of the Sidarises' films, is never brutal. Relatively few people are killed, and the widespread destruction is staged in a spirit of good clean fun. The many sex scenes are handled in much the same way; they're centerfold pretty,
rather than raunchy. The heros and heroines of GUNS are loyal to one another and their government, are not foul mouthed, and don't abuse drugs or alcohol--an occasional glass of white wine, perhaps. They are very clean, and are often seen taking showers or bathing in natural settings. (Violence,
sexual situations, nudity.) leave a comment