The Action Cinema of Andy Sidaris:

Fit to Kill

Video review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 7/14/97

Andy Sidaris just might be the only currently-active, American-born action filmmaker worthy of criticism. His movies really move, like the best Hong Kong actioners and unlike your basic bloated Hollywood shoot-’em-up. It helps that Sidaris (a former ABC Sports staff director who branched out into movies in ’73 and started his own production company in ’85) conceives his low-budget blowouts primarily for the same overseas theaters that play the Hong Kong stuff. (His works are straight-to-video releases in the U.S.) Many are set in Hawaii, the perfect mid-Pacific metaphor for his mix of American action elements (huge guns, huge muscles, huge breasts) and Asian film staples (preposterous stunts, exhaustingly convoluted plots). His stars (chiefly bodybuilders, male models, and Playboycenterfolds) know they can’t act and gleefully don’t care. His story premises might mix blackmail, espionage, and drug smuggling (his newest, Hard Hunted, even fits in Internet cyber-crooks); but they’re just excuses to get the characters’ Uzis out and their blouses off. His frequent softcore sex scenes exist in a universe of complete gender equality–his female roles are just as strong and assertive as his male roles; his guys are just as dumb as his gals. And no matter how steamy the snuggling or how gross the gunfire, the dialogue never gets naughtier than this line in Hard Ticket to Hawaii: “All I know is I want to lick the nail polish right off your toes.”Start with Malibu Express, his least violent film (and his first as producer). If you end up digging its over-the-top strangeness and eager-to-please showmanship, consider moving on to his more recent titles like The Dallas Connection, Picasso Trigger, and the aerobics-themed Fit to Kill.

(LATTER-DAY NOTE: The Sidaris family has asked me to invite readers of this page to their own site, www.andysidaris.com.)