This piece was originally published in Cashiers du Cinemart #17 in June of 2013.
As cinematic immortality goes, there are certainly worse ways to be remembered than as “the guy who made Hard Ticket to Hawaii.” That’s likely to be just how film history will remember Andy Sidaris, the softcore action auteur whose L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies series of films provided many a late night of entertainment on premium cable from the mid-’80s through the late ’90s. Before Sidaris became the top name in late-night action cinema, he had a long career in television: he moved from directing a Los Angeles children’s show called The Magic Land of Alakazam in the late 1950s to a 25-year run on ABC’s Wide World of Sports (1961–1986). He won an Emmy for his coverage of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico. In the ’70s, Sidaris directed Monday Night Football, a handful of episodes of popular television series such as Kojak and The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and he was even hired to do (un-credited) football choreography for Robert Altman’s Vietnam War classic M*A*S*H (1970). He also did un-credited work on the boxing kangaroo film Matilda (1978).
Although Sidaris is best known for his iconic ’80s features, he first flirted with feature filmmaking during his prolific period of television work. Sidaris directed three features during this phase of his career: The Racing Scene (1969), Stacey…
