Subtlety, thy name is Sidaris.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

Cast: Soap opera star and consonant enthusiast Ronn Moss gets top billing as Rowdy Abilene, the cousin of Malibu Express’s Cody Abilene (and has apparently inherited the titular yacht now that Cody is a movie star). This establishes continuity in the Sidarisverse, something I’m hoping continues. Though he’s ostensibly the star, he’s more of a sidekick to the pair of nearly identical blondes who are the film’s true heroes.

Miss March 1984 Dona Speir and Miss July 1985 Hope Marie Carlton are these heroically identical and identically heroic blondes, Donna and Taryn. They’re chiefly identifiable by the size of their clothing-averse breasts: Speir is a tad bustier. They’re DEA agents (although Taryn is a civilian or something and might be in witness protection, making me think Sidaris doesn’t really understand law enforcement) whose cover includes flying a cargo plane, giving tours, and posing in next to nothing. They’re fond of discussing their secret identities out in the open.

Harold Diamond, apparently famous for being Rambo’s stick-fighting opponent in Rambo III, is Jade. Despite having a stripper’s name, Jade is a slab of beefcake who looks like he got hit in the face with the entire ‘80s all at once. He sports a greasy ponymullet, has no idea about the invention of the button, and is a master of White Guy Karate.

Sidaris favorite Rodrigo Obregon is Seth Romero, the ill-fated villain. More on him later.

Miss October 1985 Cynthia Brimhall is Edy, who is some kind of DEA informant who runs a resort. She’s mostly there because two playmates don’t have enough breasts for Andy Sidaris. Her efforts are being foiled by…

Michael Andrews as Michael/Michele. In his second appearance, Sidaris’s favorite cross-dresser plays one of Romero’s henchmen. Andrews comes by his female impersonation honestly: he was the winner of the 1977 Miss Gay America pageant.

Playmate Quotient: Other than Speir, Carlton, and Brimhall, Miss May 1984 Patty Duffek pops up as “Pattycakes,” a character who will later appear in two other Sidaris films.

IMDB Plot Keywords: Diamonds, Erotica, Helicopter, Jacuzzi, No Panties

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: All U.S. Released Movies: 1970-2014, Movies reviewed on Junk Food Dinner, 80’s Action Movies: Best and Worst, Bad Movie Night, Worst Movies Of All Time

Synopsis: The DEA sends agent Donna and possible civilian Taryn to Hawaii to bring down accident-prone drug kingpin Seth Romero. Meanwhile, Romero proves his evil bona fides when a couple of his henchmen — Shades, Balding Skateboard Registered Sex Offender, and Sweats-When-He-Eats — murder a couple of Molokai cops. Only one of those names is actually the guy’s stated character name, but the others are entirely accurate.

Meanwhile, at a warehouse where Donna and Taryn have their cover, two snakes have been imported into Hawaii. One of them is fine and headed for some kind of animal preserve, and the other one is “infected with the deadly toxins of a thousand cancer-infested rats” which is totally not a thing, but there you go. Anyway, Donna and Taryn fuck up and take the bad snake along with a honeymooning couple to some beautiful Hawaiian beach. While there, they happen upon a remote controlled helicopter crime boss Mr. Chang (totally played by a white British guy making me think Sidaris doesn’t understand Chinese people either) was using to transport a package to the island.

Balding Skateboard Registered Sex Offender and Sweats-When-He-Eats intercept Taryn and Donna at the helicopter. Fortunately (and despite their secret identities), both women were carrying ninja weapons. Taryn hurls some nunchucks at Sex Offender, and Donna catches Sweats with a throwing star to the nipple. The girls get away with Mr. Chang’s package. Ew. No, wait.

Donna and Taryn decide to head to the jacuzzi to have a topless discussion about what they found, because their boobs need precious air in order to think. The package contains a little bag of diamonds, which will be the movie’s MacGuffin. Donna and Taryn call in Rowdy and Jade for help. Proving that was an awesome idea, a couple of Romero’s thugs rough the girls up a little and the evil snake gets away in the fracas. Romero, who was hilariously waiting outside with the car, sees the snake and freaks out, leading to a full blown retreat. Donna shoots Romero in the face (not fatally) as he flees.

Jade and Rowdy arrive on the island to be immediately attacked by Balding Skateboard Registered Sex Offender. This scene instantly raises the film several notches on the Holy Living Fuck meter. Okay, so Jade and Rowdy are cruising along in their jeep, looking like a couple bros searching for anonymous sodomy and PEDs. BSRSO is doing a handstand on his skateboard, like all skeevy forty-year-olds do. He gets to Sweats-When-He-Eats, who has a blow-up sex doll in the car for some reason. They zoom up the road past the good guys, so BSRSO can skate downhill at the good guys again. For his attack, he grabs a gun and the blow-up doll because all of a sudden this guy is Lars and the Real Girl. BSRSO skates back, shoots Jade non-fatally, and gets totally creamed by the jeep. He flies up in the air, and Rowdy pulls a four-barreled rocket launcher and blows BSRSO up. Then he rockets the sex doll, because fuck that thing. This is exactly as incredible as it sounds.

Not making any of this up.

Meanwhile, the snake kills the honeymooning couple Donna and Taryn dropped off in the beginning. This has nothing to do with anything.

Michele drops the drag act and kidnaps Edy with help from the two thugs who menaced Donna and Taryn earlier. Our heroes are watching Romero’s compound and witness Edy’s arrival. Donna and Taryn gather up Jade and Rowdy and plan an attack. Rowdy and Donna take a break for some sex, and unlike the other sex scenes in the film, this one doesn’t fade out after some topless kissing, although it’s pretty obvious Donna would rather kiss pretty much anything else. Who could blame her, when from the way Rowdy lines up his pelvis to her navel, it’s clear he got sex lessons from Tommy Wiseau.

Anyway, the plan is to kill Shades, who is the sole guard outside the compound. Despite the fact that he openly carries an Uzi, some girl plays frisbee with him every day. Rowdy, in an upsetting banana hammock, paddles a surfboard in and plays frisbee with Shades. What’s this? A bladed frisbee? Fuck yes. Rowdy owns Shades with the weapon every kid in the ‘80s fantasized about having.

Rowdy clutches his preferred murder weapon.

Donna flies in on a gliding plane and drops grenades on the compound while Rowdy, Jade, and Taryn zoom in on a jeep and shoot the place up. It’s like the end of Beverly Hills Cop with a thousand percent more boobs and rockets. Taryn kills Michael, Donna blows up a helicopter full of bad guys, and Romero escapes (something no one realizes until later in the car where they’re like, “Hey, where was Seth?”)

Donna’s at home, ready to unwind, but here comes Seth! What follows is the saddest fight in the history of film. At first, it looks like Romero has a chance, but it quickly becomes apparent he broke into the wrong fucking house. Donna shoots him with a spear gun, stabs him with his own knife, kicks him when he’s down, and feeds him to the evil snake which lives in her toilet now. Donna contemplates how she’s going to murder the snake when Rowdy bursts through the wall on his motorcycle and shoots a rocket in the goddamn house, something I was never allowed to do as a kid. The snake blows up.

Toilet snake.

The movie clears up its last loose end when Rowdy and Donna go murder Mr. Chang, who, let me remind you, is extremely white. In the end, Taryn claims she owns the diamonds now because squatter’s rights or something. Over the credits, we see a brief recap of the many breasts in the film.

Yakmala? Other than the snake, which is a truly bizarre touch, the film is far too competent for inclusion. I was struck by the weird amount of internal logic present. For example, in one comic scene where two football players are giving vulgar answers to softball interview questions, it’s revealed later that they’re both drunk. Once again, Sidaris made the movie he was trying to make. And then added a monster snake because sometimes the muse must be obeyed even if she’s off her meds.

Lauri’s Thoughts: I don’t think I can say that the director has grown as a human being, but the women in this movie at least kicked some ass. While it was unclear what their jobs at “The Agency” actually were, they at least got to fly their own plane, drive their own car, and Donna got to blow up a helicopter with a bazooka and kick the shit out of Prominent Forehead Man who was trying to kill her. It was still a terrible movie full of awkward topless groping sessions (which the director apparently thinks are sex scenes), but at least I actually cheered for Donna and Taryn. And any scene with the bazooka was gold. However, I do want to strangle the person who wrote the horrible theme song that WILL NOT GET OUT OF MY HEAD.

To sum up, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, here’s how I rate it:
Girls = 4 (no sympathy numbers, they earned this one by kicking some ass)
Guns = 10 (a bazooka is used to blow up a skateboarder, his blow up doll, a helicopter, and a contaminated snake – unnecessary and wonderful)
G-Strings = 2 (there were 3 g-strings this time if you count the sumo wrestlers!)

Maki’s Thoughts: When I initially mentioned these DVDs, a twitter pal of mine (@BigMaki – go follow him now!) chimed in with some Sidaris love. He’ll be contributing some thoughts to the reviews. Who is he? I’m glad you asked:

Maki is one of the hosts of Bad Movie Fiends, a weekly podcast dedicated to finding and reviewing the good “bad” movies, of which multiple Andy Sidaris movies have been featured. Check them out at BMFcast.com.

Hard Ticket To Hawaii was my introduction to Andy Sidaris, and I have to admit it probably spoiled me for everything else the man would put out. If you’re making a checklist of things that you’d want in his movies, Hard Ticket is the only one that would have every single box checked. There’s the boobs, the guns, the explosions, the remote control vehicles, the terrible one-liners… Then you suddenly put a razorblade frisbee, a rocket launcher blowing up a skateboarder holding an inflatable doll for no reason and you’ve officially thrown in the proverbial kitchen sink as well. And oh yeah, that sink has A CANCER SNAKE IN IT THAT ALSO GETS BLOWN UP WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER. Because why not, right?

I imagine the scriptwriting process involved this exchange fairly often:

“What’s the awesomest way to kill off this henchman?”
“I dunno, let me ask my 12-year-old son again.”

And then they put in whatever he said! I love this movie. 12-year-old me would have turned out a different man, had he seen this movie when he was 12. If you watch only one Sidaris movie in your life, this is the one.

“It’s leitao.”

I stared at the plate in front of me. Crispy red skin. Gooey oozing fat. Moist, dripping meat. Was that a snout? No. Wait? No. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe?

So this was the legendary leitao of Bairrada, a balmy region of red clay and sand landscapes twenty kilometers inland from the Atlantic, an hour and a half south of Porto and four hours north of the Algarve, where pasty pudgy British tourists disembark every July to quickly turn a seared bright red, a modern sort of invading Lobsters replacing the Redcoats of colonial America. But what is it? It’s more than food. It’s a lifestyle. It’s regional pride. Every restaurant we sped past on the winding unnamed roads advertised “LEITAO” in massive letters. Or minimal letters. Or letters in between, but mostly massive letters. The dish is consumed with a religious devotion reserved for only the finest of the world’s regional dishes: okonomiyaki in the Kansai, poutine in Quebec, vodka and Red Bull in West Hollywood.

But what is leitao?

It’s a baby pig. A suckling pig. A piglet, sans striped singlet.

It’s a six-week old pig, slaughtered and dressed fresh: the larger purveyors have pens of piglets on the property where they squeal and scurry contentedly before being zapped unconscious and disemboweled.

Its body cavity is rubbed with a proprietary mix of lard and spices which vary from purveyor to purveyor but all involve some combination of salt, garlic and lots of pepper (both black and white). Some assaderos (as Leitao specialists are known, basically Portuguese for “grillmaster”) also inject that spice mixture between the skin and flesh. The piglet is unceremoniously skewered on a spit and suspended in a hot clay oven. The best leitao is fired in an oven made from the local red clay, whose temperature is judged by the color of its heated glow. Village gates in Bairrada are adorned with statues of young pigs. Should an uninitiated traveler barrel down the highway and notice such glorious homage to such pre-pubescent swine he might be concerned that there was some odd Wicker Man-esque shit going on here and virginal policemen best stay away, or at least avoid the bees.

The roast pig is then cut into numerous small pieces and served on a plate with boiled or fried potatoes, an obligatory side of green salad, and slices of orange to cut the fat after you’ve consumed a few pieces. Every piece is cut to preserve meat, bone, skin and fat. The skin, puffed from meat by the layer of fat, crackles like, well, like the best pork skin on the planet. Underneath the mostly liquid pork fat oozes around the flesh which was always moister than a nun on Easter; that’s no small feat considering the tiny-ness of the pigs and the heat of the oven. My favorite bits were the meaty squares cut from the flanks, though the pieces from around the rib cage were tender and flavorful.

Our host for this particular porcine excursion was Luis Pato, one of the “three popes” of Portuguese wine making. Not my term. Luis has been producing wine since 1980 when, then working as a chemist, he made wine from his father’s old Baga vines, aged them for four years in concrete vats because he couldn’t get a bottling line together, and then entered it into a Bairrada wine competition in London where it was promptly declared the best red wine in the region–not bad for a first effort. So Luis quite the chemistry game and entered the family business full time. He’s built a reputation not only as the pre-eminent vigneron but as one of Portugal’s most ardent ambassadors, embracing nearly forgotten varietals like Baga and Maria Gomes and turning them into some of the world’s best wines.

And if there’s a wine to drink with the delicious, crackling ripping obscenity of Leitao it’s Baga, either as a vinho tinto lightly chilled or the traditional accompaniment of cold espumante tinto, Portuguese red sparkling wine. The shining acidity and sturdy tannins cut through the fat and the wine’s cooked cherry fruit flavors compliment the peppery meat in the same way a good cherry compote rounds out a nice tenderloin. We visited Luis’ local where the massive piles of meat were neverending and the rotund diners left smiling back out to the vineyards to ensure there’d be grapes to replace what they’d drunk.

Luis was such a staunch proponent of Bairrada at a time when the grape was about to go extinct that he earned the sobriquet “Mr. Baga” which he wears with great pride. His vineyards are scattered throughout the region, including his Quinta do Ribeirinho grapes from vines planted by his father almost 50 years ago and a small plot of Baga vines he acquired that are well over 100 years old. This vineyard is located off the main thoroughfare down a rutty dirt road where, while en route, we passed a pair of policemen on horseback who had just scared away a prostitute. She had driven her car off the road with a john in tow to presumably get down to business, a common practice we were told for roadside “car prostitutes” in rural Portugal. After being forced to get out of the Suzuki 4×4 so it could clear a particularly nasty bump in the road, we found ourselves surrounded by the gnarled, ancient vines, some of which were well over six feet high.

In one sandy corner of mostly clay soil Bairrada, Luis has planted some Baga and Touriga Nacional on original European rootstock: because it is difficult for the phylloxera aphid to maneuver in sandy soil the vines are able to resist the pest. The very low-yielding grapes produce concentrated wine with more brambly fruit notes than the grafted vines.

Despite being Bairrada’s shining star, Mr. Baga didn’t use the DOC on most of his wines for a number of years, fighting the region’s administrators over its overly legislative attitude, which he believed was restricting many producer’s abilities to bring Bairrada wine making into the 21st century. Because of Luis’ efforts, the DOC made extensive revisions to its regulations and beginning with the 2008 vintage all of Luis Pato’s wines again bear the Bairrada DOC label.

Whether the regular “Casta Baga” Tinto 2007 or Baga Vinhas Velhas 2005, give the grape a try and uncork what is as much one iconoclast’s story as it is the history and culture of his region. And if you can, enjoy it with delicious, fatty, crispy, spicy leitao.

On Monday, Apple announced several big things at the keynote for their Worldwide Developers Conference: a revision of their MacBook Air line, a preview of their upcoming Mac OS X Mavericks (wait, what? Mavericks? Fine.), and a long-awaited reboot of their Mac Pro that looks like it was designed by Dyson. But all of this was secondary to the news everyone was waiting for: iOS 7.

Now, iOS gets updated every year, usually to coincide with a new iPhone, which I imagine will come with the official release of iOS 7 in the fall, and is accompanied with the usual fanfare. But this time was different. Many had anticipated a complete visual overhaul, mainly due to the influence of Jony Ive, Apple’s longtime hardware designer and newly-minted software designer. And the pundits were not wrong in their predictions.

The buzzword pre- and post-keynote was “skeuomorphism,” as in the predicted lack of it in iOS 7. Skeuomorphism is not, as initially thought, an offshoot of Zoroastrianism. It’s that thing – and I know I’m about to sound like Stefon here – where an artificial item looks like the thing it’s representing. Specifically speaking to iOS, it’s how the Calendar app, especially on iPad, looked like a desk calendar, or how the Game Center app (that I’ve maybe viewed 3 times ever) was clad in green felt, much like a pool or card table. I guess the assumption behind this aesthetic was some sort of subliminal trigger to the user that whatever app you were using served that particular purpose. “Stitched leather? Oh, it’s like a Filofax!” And so forth.

This.

What got me, and many others, about the keynote wasn’t that they just eliminated the skeuomorphism; they killed it completely. They murdered it. They pulled its pants down in the school gym and laughed at its tiny dick. Think I’m being weird? Well, I am, but read some of these quotes:

On Game Center’s new look: “We ran out of green felt.”

Regarding the Calendar app: “Absolutely no cows were harmed in the making of this.”

Given the high-profile (and contentious) removal of previous software VP Scott Forstall, it’s hard not to read these jokes as throwing Forstall under the bus for such design choices. The final straw was, of course, the Maps debacle, but he also seemed to be a big champion for the skeuomorphic design choices all over iOS. (Apparently, though, so was Jobs.) Jony Ive’s inheritance of the interface design job augured such a design overhaul, but the very fact that there were jokes made directly toward the previous designs at the official keynote speaks loudly to the glee the new team must have had in ditching the felt and wood. These weren’t passing remarks; the iOS team went on a stage in public and basically said, “Fuck you, shiny buttons.”

Forstall may be at home, curled up with a bottle of whiskey, crying. Or maybe not. Either way, it had to sting.

ARTIST’S RENDERING

What of the redesign? I like it, quite a bit really. It’s good eye candy, if nothing else. Even if you dislike the new look, this is the first total redesign for iOS ever, and I think it was due for a reboot (ha) soon. But the larger point, I feel, is that with this new design, the era of digital skeuomorphism is on its way out. Windows Phone made a big splash (critically, at least, I’m not sure that many people are using Windows Phone) with its flat, tile-based format. And it looks like Android has at least gone part of the way away from skeuomorphism. iOS’s discarding of leather and wood has put another nail in the coffin.

And why now? Why, after only a few years of smartphone touch interfaces, have software designers moved away from skeuomorphism? Simply, I don’t think we need it anymore. When the iPhone and its descendents first arrived, even if we would understand what a piece of software did anyhow, maybe there was a need to subliminally telegraph an app’s function to the user as a way to introduce people to these new machines. Now that these phones and tablets have become massive successes, and are so ubiquitous that someone using a “dumb phone” draws a few curious looks nowadays, that telegraphing is unnecessary. We get how a calendar app works; no need for leather binding. We can just arrange the dates in order and we get the idea.

Of course, it could also be that stitched leather looks goofy on a touchscreen, and we’re better than that.

Yeah, no.

For more computer goodness, check out Clint’s remembrances of computer games past, or Erik’s look back at TRON.

Press in case of narrative difficulties.

Any story of struggle has to be an underdog story. When the hero triumphs over the villain no one cares unless the hero was outgunned, outmatched, and outnumbered. Well, unless you’re talking about The Avengers, which was two and a half hours of six jocks kicking the special kid’s ass and taking his lunch money, with the only real threat coming courtesy of the U.S. government (thanks a lot, Obama!). The hero has to overcome some long odds or there’s no suspense. So the writer packs obstacle upon obstacle in front of the protagonist until it seems like there’s literally no way the poor bastard will ever survive, let alone triumph. Look at Die Hard, not only the greatest action movie ever made, but a step-by-step manual on how to navigate office buildings and murder foreign nationals. John McClane is trapped by thirteen guys with machine guns, and all he has is a pistol. His vulnerability is telegraphed in his lack of shoes. His only ally is the fat dad from Family Matters. The only way shit could be worse is if he were married to Bonnie Bedelia or something.

This is where things get a little difficult. If the bad guys are so bad ass and the hero is so fucked, then how does he win? Oftentimes, this comes down to the one thing the bad guys over looked, a Big Red Button that, when pushed, causes the entire evil scheme to come crashing down. The rules to using the Big Red Button correctly are ultimately subjective, but following them will insure that you don’t need Robert Downey Jr. deploying his charisma to obfuscate massive logic gaps.

Maybe the most famous Big Red Button in the history of storytelling belongs to the Death Star. See, the GALACTIC EMPIRE (sue me, that’s how it’s written in the crawl), created a space station that was, in the sneering words of Admiral Chokeabitch, “the ultimate power in the universe.” It flew around at a stately pace and could blow up planets with a bizarre cannon that seemed to fire from several thousand miles next to it. The secret plans to the station revealed a weakness (the Big Red Button): a little exhaust port. Shoot the thing and a chain reaction gets set off reducing the entire station into light, particles, and a CGI ring. As much fun as pop culture nerds make of the Death’s Star’s fatal flaw, it is a case of the Big Red Button being employed correctly.

For one, the exhaust port isn’t an automatic “I win!” button. No, just to get there you have to fly along a trench through laser fire thick enough to walk on while TIE fighters swarm around you like angry bees. Then the shot has to be exactly right or the Death Star shrugs it off, sends a letter home to the wife of the one Stormtrooper who got killed by sparks, and blows up your fucking planet. Additionally, the weak point is described as an “exhaust port” and thus presumably serves some kind of a function. It’s there for a solid reason, or solid enough to excuse its presence. And lastly, the whole point is that is represents the arrogance of the Empire. It’s there because they can’t conceive of something as small as a single man being a threat to their moon-sized planet killer. So while the Death Star’s Big Red Button might be a little silly after a generation of snarky fan articles, it works as effective, relatively logical storytelling.

The Big Red Button in Cabin in the Woods does not. For those who haven’t seen it, the film posits every survival horror film about a bunch of kids going off to a secluded cabin and being hunted by some monster as the fault of a shadowy government installation beneath. The cabin contains a way to summon any number of bogeyman and the teens pick the method of their demise when they inevitably rummage through Satan’s basement for the right artifact to tickle. It’s like summoning Gozer, but there are no hilarious options. The best sequence in the film occurs at the end of the second act when the surviving teenagers discover the secret base under the titular cabin and take an elevator ride down. The elevator formerly housed the Redneck Torture Zombies the teens inadvertently chose as their executioner, and our heroes repurpose it as an entry into the secret base. As they descend into the earth they pass other clear elevator cages containing the different creatures they could have chosen. Each bogeyman is an inspired redesign of a recognizable monsters from film history. The scene itself is both chilling and lyrical, for a moment elevating Cabin in the Woods to art.

Once inside the base, the teens find a literal Big Red Button and press it. At that moment, all of the cubes housing every monster open into the base itself and proceed to slaughter the people that work there. All I could think of when this happened was what possible function could that button have served? Its only possible function would be to kill every single person in the base (a base, incidentally, that the operators believe is the only thing standing against the apocalypse). Why would that ever be on the building’s schematics? And while we’re at it, why would the elevators housing the monsters even open into the base itself? Did they need easy access for a veterinarian in case one of the Cenobites got worms or something?

The simple answer is this: the elevators only open into the building because the screenwriters needed a way for the teens to get into the base. The button is there to allow them to win against impossible odds. There is no logical reason for such a thing to exist, and it acts as an instant (literal) “I win” button. There is no struggle. Find the button, press it, and the bad guys have been defeated. Easy peasy.

It’s writing at its absolute laziest, marring an otherwise fun film about the horror genre. The hilarious thing, from an outsider’s perspective is this: okay, so maybe they have some reason to install a button whose only purpose is to horribly kill the very people whose existence keeps the world turning. Wouldn’t you, you know, install some password protection? A key maybe? Hell, even James Bond villains will put a covering on it.

Cabin in the Woods hinges on the Big Red Button and provides us with the clearest case of the trope being used to rob a film of its tension. Kind of makes me long for the days of the exhaust port barely smaller than a womp rat.

Much of that stemmed from the simple fact that the principal thrust of their ad campaign was: “We know you thought our pizza was shitty and, you know what, it probably was, but now we’ve made it better, we promise.” And even though my skepticism endured until just about a year ago, you know what? Domino’s Pizza really is a lot better, just as cheap, and thanks to a fantastic mobile app, a lot of fun to order.

A wise food writer–I’m going to say it was Alan Richman–pointed out that pizza, generally speaking, is rarely bad. It is, after all, bread, cheese, and oftentimes fatty meats. What sets the great pizzas apart is a mix of the quality of its ingredients and ultra high-temperature ovens. Absent those, the vast majority of pizzas are, well, just pizza.

So what raised Domino’s from terrible to more-than-acceptable?

1. The app. It really can’t be stressed enough that the Domino’s pizza app is amazing. It makes ordering pizza fun, effortless, and actually fairly personal. The app automatically has all current coupons loaded into it, remembers multiple locations where you’ll want your pizza delivered, and tells you who is putting your pizza in the oven and when it’s out for delivery.
2. Styling. Although their storefronts are as drab and generic as ever, their pizza boxes, website, and overall aesthetic is modern and fun without feeling forced.
3. The pizza actually is better. Better crust. Multiple crust options. Better toppings. MUCH better sauce. And their lineup of Artisan Pizzas and American Legends Pizza combos are, quite frankly, delicious.

I still have lots of love for my premium pizza purveyors, but when you need a pile of pizza at a reasonable price at all hours, Domino’s is no longer one you’ll feel ashamed of ordering. Will you still feel a little dirty? Sure, but that’s not always a bad thing.

Note: Here’s the direct link for the moment while we deal with some technical difficulties. This internet thing is always a learning process.

Satan does not appear in this film.

Reefer Madness is the gold standard of Depression-era anti-drug hysteria. In the years since its debut, it has become an unintentional cult classic. Combining a grade-schooler’s understanding of marijuana with delightfully unhinged performances, it casts pot as a demon weed with all the power of crystal meth, PCP, and Wolverine when he has amnesia. Other movies tried to do the same thing, and though they are not classics, they fail just as spectacularly, like this week’s Yakmala entry, 1935’s The Cocaine Fiends a.k.a. The Pace That Kills.

Tagline: The white dust from hell!

More Accurate Tagline: The white dust from Walgreens!

Guilty Party: Normally when it comes to this section, I blame the film’s director. Sometimes I blame the writer, occasionally the producer, possibly a lead actor, if it’s obvious who greenlit the film in question. For The Cocaine Fiends I’m forced to go farther afield and blame William Randolph Hearst and the British East India Company. The former gets the blame for using yellow journalism to kick off the same hysteria that birthed these films (solely to protect his personal fortune in timber) and the latter for addicting all of China to opium to get at the sweet, sweet tea they were hiding. Thanks, you rich fuckwads. You screwed up the scope of history for the sake of a buck.

Synopsis: The film wastes no time in laying out its thesis, namely that cocaine is bad. It does so with a misspelled and poorly-formatted opening crawl begging for “an aroused and educated public awareness.” I suggest stroking the public’s awareness until it grows turgid, but to stop before it loses control and sprays educational pamphlets all over everything.

A couple gangsters want to get to a nearby town to start selling the Bolivian marching powder they have in the back of their car. The fuzz is after them, so one guy, Nick the Pusher, gets out with the product and hides in a diner while the driver keeps going. I have no idea how they manage the drop without the cops seeing. Nick flirts with Jane, who appears to be the only employee in this diner. He says she belongs in the city and he knows a fella who could put her in a show right away! She has a headache, and what luck, he has the grandest headache medicine in the world! He teaches her how to snort it, just like a good father showing his son how to get a squirmy nightcrawler on a hook, or how to shoot up between the toes so no one notices the needle tracks. He promises to come back and see her.

Through the magic of smash cuts, he’s doing just that, trying to get her to come to town with him. He gives her more booger sugar and she agrees to marry him. She’ll stay with friends of his until the wedding, since living together would be indecent. Turns out, these “friends” are just this one older lady who holds Jane prisoner. Nick fills Jane full of drugs, takes her out every now and again, and will eventually kick her to the curb when she’s all used up. Jane asks for some headache powder. The older woman laughs, and informs her that it’s actually dope, cocaine, the kid-catcher. And just… wow. I guess that last one meant something before perverts were invented.

Meanwhile, Nick keeps Jane controlled with, um, kid-catcher, and finally gives her that stage show she was promised, at a dive called the Dead Rat Cafe. One day, while Nick drops off some headache powder at a drive-in restaurant (to be distributed by carhop and Sergeant Pepper lookalike Fanny), Jane recognizes the other carhop working there: It’s Eddie, her brother come to the big city to look for his runaway sister. Another character, wealthy socialite Dorothy, is introduced here, and she has the hots for Eddie. Fanny asks Eddie on a date, but he’s too tired. Kid-catcher to the rescue! Oh, man. He’d just be the worst pulp hero ever.

Kid-Catcher poses for his Justice League ID.

Eddie and Jane run into each other that night at the club. Jane pretends not to know him, and sends him packing with her catchphrase: “Beat it, you!” Dorothy, also at the Dead Rat that night, gets scolded later at home by her wealthy father for hanging out with a bad element. Eddie and Fanny sink further into the drug scene and get fired for being hopheads. A time jump later, and Fanny has a part time job and Eddie is sleeping in the park. He moves in, which is so scandalous, even Nick the Pusher refused to do it.

Eddie, hooked bad, begs for dope. Fanny, though broke, goes out and gets it somehow. The movie never really says. Fanny later runs into Dorothy outside the Dead Rat Cafe, and Dorothy gives the woman some money. Fanny comes home and gives Eddie the money, asking if they might quit the dope. Eddie refuses and leaves. Fanny stares at the stove, and it is later revealed that she killed herself.

Meanwhile, at the Dead Rat Cafe, there’s a diversion and Nick kidnaps Dorothy. He leaves her in the same place he initially took Jane. Jane, suddenly remembering she was in the movie, finds Eddie in a racist, old-timey opium den. Jane tells him he’s only a first stage hophead, and he can still go home if he has a little money.

Fun fact! Third Stage Hopheads get to be Guild Navigator.

Desperate for cash, Jane goes to the rape house to extort some cash from Nick. Instead, she finds Dorothy, who is there for “the boss” who likes cute little blondes. So that’s nice. Anyway, Jane calls the cops, but Nick shows up first. She kills Nick, and then the boss shows up. Turns out it’s Dorothy’s dad! So, that was going to be an awkward sex slave gift. Well, you know. More awkward than most.

Still, all’s well that ends well!  Dorothy gets herself a cop husband.  Who knows what happens to Jane and Eddie?  Wasn’t like they were the main characters or anything.

Life-Changing Subtext: Drugs ruin women, but men have a shot at redemption.

Defining Quote: Eddie, subtly explaining his problem to Fanny: “I’ve gotta have dope! I’m a hophead! I’d sell my soul for just one shot!”

Standout Performance: Lois January as Jane is so recognizable as a trope in ‘30s acting to have slipped into unfortunate and hilarious self-parody. And she has a catchphrase! “Beat it, you!”

What’s Wrong: An anti-drug cheapie from the Depression probably wasn’t going to be good no matter what, but some basic understanding of what cocaine is might have been nice. I’m not asking them to predict the ‘80s or anything, but don’t confuse it with opium.

Flash of Competence: The plot twist with Dorothy’s dad has just enough noirish insanity to be appealing.

Best Scenes: In the film’s single bid to provide some kind of temporal context, we periodically cut back to Jane and Eddie’s widowed mom. The scene is always the weird tubby mailman telling her there’s no mail for her. The best part is the performance of the mailman, who infuses every line with a leer, so that the act of getting a letter from one’s estranged offspring comes off feeling smutty.

This is apropos of nothing, but this line is amazing: “Dames don’t tip like men. They pay off in smiles!”

Transcendent Moment: There’s nothing quite so funny as the junkie breakdown in the climax of any anti-drug entertainment. From the escalating insanity of the party in Reefer Madness to Jessie Spano singing “I’m so exciiiited!” it’s tough to match the hilarity of such earnest material employed for melodramatic means. In this case, Eddie begs for coke (in the film’s Defining Quote), before slipping into wheedling. It’s implied Fanny goes out and whores herself out for the drug, but you know what might have been effective in scaring people? Someone shown whoring themselves for drugs!

I’m not saying we need a tossed salad joke or anything.

The Cocaine Fiends is a relic of a more innocent time. A more hilarious one, too.

For another film from this same collection, check out my review of the Melville-penned Omoo-Omoo the Shark God!