Girls, Guns and G-Strings: Day of the Warrior

pew pew pew!

Andy Sidaris is back! And with him comes the first instance of the “L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies” series title you see applied to these skin flicks.

Cast: This is a weird installment to parse (aren’t they all) because of the mix of returning actors, returning characters (not always one for one), and new strippers, bodybuilders, and head trauma victims that comprise our players.

An increasingly haggard Julie K. Smith returns as Cobra, and this is the only case of an actor returning to the same role. We have some of the same actors, and possibly some of the same roles, but Smith is the only one conclusively playing the same character. God, these movies are strange.

Kevin Light and Cristian Letelier play the Bruce Penhall and Mark Barriere roles as the ostensible leads Doc Austin and J. Tyler Ward. And yes, that is the most thought any Sidaris has ever put into a name. Shae Marks plays Tiger, an agent whose chief power seems to be staying upright while supporting a pair of fake breasts Jim Lee would describe as excessive. Marcus Bagwell plays the titular Warrior and if I start talking about him now I’ll never stop. Raye Hollitt plays “Kym,” and she’s clearly not the same character as the Kym from some of the earlier installments… or is she?!

Julie Strain returns, this time as Willow Black, the leader of the good guys. Her partner is Fu, played by Gerald Okamura. You remember Fu, he was in the last movie, played by the same actor, only he was blown right the fuck up. On camera. Maybe being hit with a grenade makes you good in this universe? Who the fuck knows. Richard Cansino (thankfully without Chu Chu Malave) is back as yet another incompetent “comic relief” hitman, this time named J.P. Cassidy Phillips, the former Platter Puss is his partner Chaz. Rodrigo Obregon plays the evil Manuel in this one, but he barely has anything to do with the plot. I think Sidaris was throwing his old pal some work.

Ron Browning plays another mulleted bad guy here also named Ron, and Carolyn Liu, the former Silk, has what amounts to a cameo as a woman in a bikini with the bad taste to date either J.P. or Chaz.

The last cast member worth mentioning is Tammy Parks as Scorpion. It seems like she’s supposed to be the same character originated by Wendy Hamilton (this is the only place you will ever see that sentence), but she’s been recast. There’s a great documentary to be made about what went on behind the scenes in these.

Non-Actor Quotient: Strain and Smith, as well as Tammy Parks all represent Penthouse, and Parks later went on to a lengthy and terrifying career in porn. Shae Marks is our sole Playmate (May 1994), and I can’t help but think that’s a sign of the series in decline. Raye Hollitt is pretty obviously a bodybuilder, and she was also Zap of American Gladiators. Darren Wise, playing good guy assassin “Shark” has a filmography consisting entirely of this movie and Playboy videos and I don’t even want to know what’s going on there. Marcus Bagwell is most famous as WCW wrestler “Buff Bagwell,” which seems like the laziest gimmick ever. And lastly, I fucking refuse to believe Cristian Letelier is an actor. I refuse.

IMDB Plot Keywords: diamonds, bikini, softcore, sexploitation, glamorized spy film

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: DVD/Blu-Ray Colection [sic], Owned Movies on DVD, So bad they’re good watchlist, Dvds

Synopsis: The Legion to Ensure Total Harmony And Law (L.E.T.H.A.L.) computer systems have been hacked! The agents embedded undercover in the criminal empire of the Warrior will be compromised. There’s Doc Austin (Light), wearing some very ‘90s mom jeans in South Texas, Cobra, as some Frank Miller S&M stripper in Los Angeles, and Shark and Scorpion in the Warrior’s porn operation in Las Vegas. Tiger and Tyler will get Austin out, while Willow and Fu warn Cobra and extract Shark and Scorpion.

When Tiger and Tyler hook up… well… acting has never been this series’s strong point. But boy howdy do they manage to find a new low. Tyler spends the entire film with a confused look on his face, like he can’t figure out what all the cameras are doing there, and why the pretty lady is making word-sounds with her mouth-hole. Mrs. Supermarket pegged him as the human version of the “I Have No Idea What I’m Doing” Dog.

Tyler.

The Warrior turns out to be a greased-up ‘roid monster in some chintzy Native American gear and… well, maybe it’s offensive, but it’s so goddamn stupid it wraps around to funny again. The Warrior supposedly has some Indian in him, but it’s probably just him whining that he understands the minority experience because he’s 1/16th Cherokee. Anyway, his preferred method of execution is pro-wrestling people to death in his ring, which is only moderately more cruel than making people look at his frosted tips. He has a mole inside L.E.T.H.A.L. codenamed “Hard Drive,” who apparently hates him, because he hooks him up with his two fucktarded assistants J.P. and Chaz. Their jobs? To eliminate the undercover heroes.

While Cobra does something with diamonds I don’t really get (and her awful theme song plays!), she’s stalked by an assassin who would be really scary if I were a supersized Big Mac combo. Since I’m not, I think Cobra will be fine. She is, as Willow sends a coded transmission in time to warn her, and Cobra kills the hitman in a shootout. Sadly, it’s not J.P. or Chaz. Tyler and Tiger rescue Austin after a short gunfight in which Tyler seems baffled about why tree-people shoot gun thunder noise pants hurt? Willow and Fu (who keeps doing stereotypical kung fu dialogue that’s supposed to be funny), go to bail out Shark and Scorpion, and arrive just in time. J.P. and Chaz manage to wound both agents (which is better than any character played by Richard Cansino has managed in five movies), but Willow and Fu chase the bad guys off.

The good guy team of Austin, Tyler, Willow, Cobra, and Fu unite. There’s this weird moment when posters from Savage Beach and Do or Die are on the wall, and I can’t decide if this is some kind of reference to the obvious artifice of the movies, confirmation that these are a new continuity, or a sign that Sidaris was just too lazy to take them off the wall when they filmed at his house. Actually, it’s the last one. It has to be. Anyway, the heroes are pissed at Jordan, who plays the Lucas role here as their boss, for allowing the leak to happen. And the hilarious thing about Jordan is that he has an Australian accent that he does not hide well. I wish they’d have run with it and just turned him into Crocodile Dundee. He has an assistant named Dietrich who doesn’t talk and is so obviously the mole he might as well be wearing a fucking t-shirt with that written on it.

The Warrior is gearing up for his special day of fleeing the country with tons of loot, so the heroes know they have to strike fast. Fortunately, they know exactly where he lives for some reason. They’re pretty useless and Tyler gets shot in the leg because dur dur durrrrrrrr. So the attack happens later. The Warrior has Fu and Willow kidnapped and taken to his hideout where he can wrestle them to death while the others attempt a daring rescue. There’s a lot of weird double-crossing I don’t get here — Kym shoots Manuel and goes off with Dietrich for no reason — but the good guys win. Willow even out-wrestles the Warrior. He just wasn’t greased up enough.

Yakmala? Yes. The acting has devolved to the point where they would have been better off having people who barely speak English read off of cue cards.