Savage Beach (1989)

It’s Wednesday afternoon as I’m starting to write this post. I have four days and change to get it written, get it edited, format it, and upload it on the blog. If you’re reading this and it came out on Sunday, then I did my job. If you’re reading this and it came out later than Sunday… Oops. I messed up again and did another late post. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, though. Hopefully I’m back on my normal writing schedule of posts every Sunday.

I’m having a little trouble writing this post and, in a meta kind of way, decided to make a post about the ideas I brainstormed before settling on this post about the ideas I brainstormed. It’s kind of a look behind the curtain of Sunday “Bad” Movies that I sometimes do because I feel like the people who actually take the time to read these posts care, at least a little bit, about how I keep making post after post after post, week in and week out.

The start of the entire brainstorming process comes with the choice of movie. At least, it sometimes does. There are movies that I go into blindly, like last week’s movie. I don’t know anything about them. There are three main ways that they end up in the schedule. They could be something that was suggested to me. Again, look at last week’s movie. Someone suggests something, I schedule it, I watch it. There could be movies that I own in those box sets that come with like 10+ cheap movies that nobody has heard of. I’m slowly making my way through a bunch of those box sets in the schedule. And then there are the movies I schedule based on the title alone. If there’s a ridiculous title, I’ll be sure to include it.

Those are the blind movies. There are other movies I go into with much more of an idea of what might happen. It could be something I’ve seen before, with the weekly watch being nothing more than a refresher before I write. The movie could be something I’ve heard of, know about, but haven’t seen yet. Or it could be a sequel to something I’ve seen before, such as this week’s movie. Sometimes, when it comes to these movies, I have an idea of what I want to write, and the watch is merely a formality so I can get a feel for the specific movie and know specifics about it. Plus, you know, I frequently enjoy the movies I watch. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Savage Beach, this week’s movie, was one of those sequels to stuff I had already seen. It followed on the heels of Malibu Express, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, and Picasso Trigger. Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton) were back. The agency tasked them with transporting something important to a hospital on a remote island. On their way back, their plane crash landed on a seemingly deserted island. They had to fight against a couple military guys, a couple communists, and some Japanese fighters who were all looking for lost gold from many years before.

The first idea that came to mind was the obvious idea that comes to mind with every post. I could write a review of the movie. I’ve done my fair share of reviews for movies on this blog. And you could maybe argue that this post will end up being a review in the end. I’m going to go through enough details about the movie as I write about what I brainstormed. It’ll essentially be a review, only formatted differently than most reviews. But I didn’t want to do a straight review of the movie. I’ve done that for the past, at least, three weeks. The Amityville movies were basically all reviews within a larger sub-series of posts. The Ryan’s Babe post was pretty much a review where I went over all the ludicrous stuff that happened in it. The post for Bigfoot vs Megalodon was a review where I trashed the movie. I didn’t need to do another plain jane review post.

I also find typical reviews to be the most draining posts to write. They can be quick and easy when I don’t have a lot of time, yeah. But I don’t find them as fun as doing something else. I know I’ve said that before. I’ve been saying that since, I think, four months into Sunday “Bad” Movies. I can’t do review after review for a long period of time. I need something else to ease my mind a little. I need the variety, or else I’m not going to enjoy writing these posts. And I’m not getting paid to write them, so I might as well enjoy doing it. Right?

That meant I had to move onto another idea. There were many ideas that came to mind when I was brainstorming. A whole bunch of ideas that came out before I settled on writing this behind-the-scenes sort of thing. I’m just going to quickly touch on one of the first ones that I jotted down. A common theme throughout the Andy Sidaris movies was the casting of both Playboy and Penthouse models. As soon as that came to mind, I knew it wasn’t going to be my post topic. I wrote about something similar in a previous post. I remember writing about adult stars who transitioned into mainstream acting back when I watched Ice, a movie starring Traci Lords. It’s a post I’ve done before. I could update it, maybe. I mentioned Simon Rex in it. He has since gained critical acclaim for his role in Red Rocket, where he played a porn star. But I think I should wait a few more years before revisiting that topic.

And now we get to the viable ideas that I shot down. Mostly, it was that I didn’t feel like I had enough knowledge on the topic to feel comfortable with it. Sometimes it didn’t feel right for right now. In one instance, I had an idea and immediately thought that I wasn’t the right person to cover that topic. You’ll figure out which of the brainstormed topics was which when I get to them. I’m also going to use those topics to quickly go over some of the stuff in Savage Beach because, well, this post is still about that movie, even if I’m coming at it from a “how these posts come together” sort of way.

Moving on from the Playboy models thing, the other first topic I thought of was Andy Sidaris and his stable of performers. Some directors hire the same people time and time again. You could look at someone like Christopher Guest and all the comedians that frequently appear in his work. Producers are the same way, with companies like Happy Madison using a lot of the same people through their productions. Andy Sidaris had his actors too. In the first four movies I’ve seen from him, multiple people have popped up in different roles through the different movies. Most notably, at this point, was Rodrigo Obregón. He played different villains in Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Picasso Trigger, and Savage Beach. Bruce Benhall played two roles in Picasso Trigger and Savage Beach, as did John Brown in Malibu Express and Picasso Trigger.

My main issue with writing about the Sidaris stable of performers was that I’d only seen four of his movies. I knew some of the actors I’d only seen in one movie would return for others. I knew some of the performers who would come into the series later on. But I had still only seen four movies directed by Andy Sidaris. That was not enough to consider my knowledge about the actors and their performances even passable. I could name people and say what movies they were in. But when it came to someone like Julie Strain, who became a main performer later on, I hadn’t even seen her in the movies yet. I couldn’t write about her in detail until I watched her movies.

So I moved on again. What did Andy Sidaris like to have in his movies? Unnecessary nudity and bad sex scenes. Unnecessary nudity is something common throughout bad movies. If a filmmaker working on a typical B-movie doesn’t have enough money for good effects, acting, or action, they can distract the audience a bit by having nudity. It’ll just be forced in there. In the case of the Triple B movies, as Andy Sidaris called them, the nudity was thrown into the movies whenever possible. This eventually led to strife between Andy Sidaris and one of the stars, Hope Marie Carlton, when she no longer wanted to get naked in his movies.

Savage Beach was a good example of excessive nudity. The opening scene was a drug bust performed by Donna, Taryn, Rocky (Lisa London) and Patty (Patty Duffek). Once the bad guys were captured, the movie immediately cut to the four women celebrating, while topless in a hot tub. When Taryn and Donna visited the hospital, it was pouring rain. Once they were back in their plane, they took off their tops, with nothing underneath, to switch to dry ones. Then there was the scene after they crash landed where the two women decided to skinny dip in the ocean. Those weren’t nearly the only scenes with nudity because I still have to get to the sex scenes.

The new Abilene family member was Shane (Michael J. Shane). He was introduced when a CB operator was asked for him. Of course, he was in the middle of sex in a pool when she got him. Of course, the woman he was having sex with followed him, topless, into the radio room. Sex and nudity, the two things that Andy Sidaris loved. I’m pretty sure that every other sex scene in the movie involved Martinez (Rodrigo Obregón), the bad guy. He was constantly hooking up with this one woman who was also a bad guy. They hooked up so much that they hooked up in the back of a car while the driver watched them instead of the road. So much sex.

I could have written an entire post about bad sex scenes in movies. There are a bunch. The Andy Sidaris movies have them. The Room has them. Road to Revenge/Champagne and Bullets/GetEven has them. Samurai Cop has them. Neil Breen even got in on the action. There are enough bad sex scenes in the repertoire of Sunday “Bad” Movies that I could easily have written a post about them. I just thought I might have already done a post like that. Though, I’ve also done a post like this before, so maybe I should have. Oh well.

The one topic I thought I wasn’t the right person for was a post about women in leading roles in action movies. Throughout the Andy Sidaris movies, aside from Malibu Express, women were given the leading roles. Donna and Taryn have been the stars of three movies I’ve seen so far. They were the ones saving the day, much more so than the Abilene family. As much as the movies were about sex and nudity, they were also about female action stars.

I’m a guy. I’m a semi-intelligent guy who can dissect and analyze movies when I want to, but I’m still a guy. It’s not my place to analyze and dissect the roles that women have in movies. I can mention it, sure. But to go into depth on the idea of women in action movies when I’m a straight white male… That’s not my place. That the place of a woman. They would understand how they have been treated through the writing of white men much more than I would. They would have insight that I could never have because I have not experienced their lives. All I’d be able to say is that Andy Sidaris saw women as sex objects, even if he frequently placed them in starring roles in his movies. But that’s kind of obvious. So, yeah, not doing a whole post about that.

Then there were two topics that felt very similar. There were two main sets of villains in Savage Beach. One of them was Martinez, who was revealed to be a communist sympathizer trying to get the gold as funding. The other was a group of Japanese people trying to get the gold for… I’m not exactly sure what. I thought, hey, I could write about communism as a villain, or I could get more specific by going with Japan and Russia as villains. I’ve definitely done part of that before.

There were a lot, and I mean a lot, of movies where the villains were continuations of World War II. The Nazis frequently showed up. The Russians and the Cold War that happened between them and the Americans following the Second World War frequently played into action movies of the 80s. Sometimes Japan was along for the ride. The traumas of the past liked to creep their way into action movies because the villains were a force that people already knew and already disliked. Savage Beach was an action movie from the late 1980s, which meant that it wasn’t out of the realm of reality for it to use that same kind of villain.

I’ve written about communist villains and Russia and the Nazis and the like before. They’ve come up in a bunch of Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. As much as they were a major influence over the story of Savage Beach, I didn’t feel the need to revisit that well for another post. There’s a bit of redundancy after a while.

That left me with the last of the brainstormed topics. The Andy Sidaris movies tended to stick to two filming locations. For the most part, I mean. They were filmed in either Texas or Hawaii. Malibu Express took place in Texas. Hard Ticket to Hawaii took place in Hawaii. Picasso Trigger had both. Savage Beach changed that up a bit by having them on a deserted island, but I’m pretty sure they filmed that deserted island on Hawaii. My brainstormed thought was that I could write about movies and television shows that either filmed in Hawaii or were set in Hawaii.

Some of the ideas I brainstorm are just that. They’re ideas. I never really consider them as viable ideas. They could be something that I know I can’t do. Or, in the case of the Hawaii one, something I don’t want to do. I just didn’t feel like writing about things set in Hawaii or things filmed in Hawaii. I know a bunch of stuff I could write about. Things like Hawaii 5-0, Lost, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and A Perfect Getaway. But something about the Hawaii topic made me not want to write that post. I’m not entirely sure why. It just rubbed me the wrong way and I decided not to do it.

Through all that brainstorming, I still hadn’t come up with an idea for Savage Beach. I didn’t have an idea that would allow me to write about the first time Donna met Shane, and how that first conversation was a bunch of double entendres involving a gun. I wasn’t going to be able to write about the good Japanese guy who was hiding out on the deserted island, covered in mud, to protect the gold. I had no way to write about how the big weapon of Savage Beach was a crossbow with explosive darts, which wasn’t nearly as fun as the exploding boomerang or the razorblade frisbee. Those things couldn’t come up naturally in any of those post ideas.

They didn’t need to, though. All I needed was a way into a post, any post. It came when I thought, “I haven’t done a brainstorming post in a while.” I thought that maybe you would like to see all the ideas I had that I didn’t decide to use for a full post. The ideas that I decided to combine for this one. So that’s what I did. I brainstormed. I showed my work. I gave you, the readers, a peek behind the curtain of what goes into many of the posts for Sunday “Bad” Movies.

From this point, there is still a bunch of work to do on this post. I have to write a closing section, which is beginning right now. I’m not very good at ending things off and never give myself time to properly fix it. Okay, never is not the right word. I rarely give myself time to fix the endings of my posts. I’m in such a rush by the time Sunday rolls around that whatever I put there typically stays there. There are slight grammar edits and stuff, but there’s not usually an overhaul to fix the feel, vibe, or context of it. It’s just there.

Then, of course, I toss some notes into the end of the post. I mention any connections the actors or directors have to other movies featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. I once again bring up any movies I mentioned during the post that were covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I plug my social media outlets and give a preview of the next movie. Then I give a friendly “see you soon” and the post comes to an end.

That’s when the editing starts. I comb through what I wrote. If I’m short on time, I’m looking for grammatical errors or things that make no sense. If I see any, I fix them. When there’s a little more time (as it looks like there will be for this post), I’ll dig deeper into it. If there’s something that sounds a little wonky, I’ll work on it. When I think I could write something a little better, I’ll try to. You know, improve the post and all that. Keep it from being the bare minimum. I don’t always have time, though. Hell, over the course of this year, I’ve been rushed or even behind on a whole lot of the posts I write. When I do have time, though, I put the work in.

Finally, I get to the pictures and links. That’s the easiest part of the post, but it can sometimes be the most time consuming. Depending on how many connections there are in the notes, the links could take a long time. I link to the posts for the movies in the connections. I link to social media. Putting the links in takes time. The pictures are a little easier. I find some images from the movie that I like. Or I find some images that show characters. I scatter them throughout the post. Voila! I have everything done and it’s ready to release.

And that’s how the posts come together for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I pick a movie. I watch the movie. I brainstorm what I could write about after watching the movie. I write. I edit. I upload. It’s as easy as that. You’ve seen me write about it before. You’ll probably see me write about it again. This kind of post has been a repeated style for a few years now. I like to share how this blog comes together, for the few people who might be interested.

It's now Sunday evening as I’m writing this final paragraph. After brainstorming a bunch of ideas for what to write, I wrote about all of them. I framed the post as a look into how I put the posts together. That’s what it was. But it was also a post that allowed me to use the ideas I chose not to use. I got to have my cake and eat it too, I guess. Next week, it will be time for another post. It will be time for another movie. And I’ll be back here for that one.

But first, some notes for this post:

• Some of the movies mentioned in this post were The Amityville Horror (week 500), Ryan’s Babe (week 501), Bigfoot vs Megalodon (week 502), Ice (week 365), The Room (week 25), and Samurai Cop (week 66).
• Savage Beach was directed by Andy Sidaris, who also directed Malibu Express (week 383), Hard Ticket to Hawaii (week 352), and Picasso Trigger (week 426). He also appeared in all four movies.
• Four actors have been in Hard Ticket to Hawaii (week 352), Picasso Trigger (week 426), and Savage Beach. They were Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Patty Duffek, and Rodrigo Obregón.
• Lisa London popped up in Savage Beach. She was also in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (week 241) and Road to Revenge (week 313).
• Another three-timer was Al Leong, who was in Godzilla (week 282), The Scorpion King (week 380), and Savage Beach.
• Christian Drew Sidaris was in Hard Ticket to Hawaii (week 352) and Savage Beach.
• Four actors were in Picasso Trigger (week 426) and Savage Beach. They were John Aprea, David Hadder, Bruce Penhall, and Roy Summersett.
• Have you seen Savage Beach? What did you think of it? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can hit me up on Twitter of you have any suggestions for movies I should watch. You could leave the suggestions in the comments as well.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Next week, I’ll be checking out a movie I saw pop up on Amazon Prime a while ago. It seemed so dumb that I thought it would make a good watch for this blog. It’s a movie called The Selling, and I’ll be able to tell you more about it in a week. See you then!