Andy Sidaris Dies at 76

Andy Sidaris and Julie Strain on the set of “Return to Savage Beach”

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen an Andy Sidaris flick, but his death on Wednesday seems to me no less than the death of a happier, more hopeful era.

Back before Pamela Anderson’s popularity on Baywatch made Playboy models more acceptable to mainstream audiences, Andy Sidaris took the “honey shot” strategy he pioneered in sporting events (which was essentially close-ups of cheerleaders and cute girls in the stands) and applied them to action movies, creating a series of Hawaii-set hot-chicks-with-guns flicks starring former Playboy and Penthouse models (particularly Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, and Cynthia Brimhall) and featuring occasional but wholly gratuitous nudity.

Teri Weigel in Savage Beach and Beckie Mullen in Hard Hunted, two of my favorite Sidaris flicks — if only because they featured Teri Weigel and Beckie Mullen

Still, as important as the honey shot was to his films, these were still films with stories — believe it or not — and were serious in their way. And influential: The later Playboy/Baywatch phenomenon aside, I remember reading long ago that one of the more memorable bits from Raiders of the Lost Ark — the one where an Arab swordsman menacingly flips and twirls his saber about for a duel before Indiana unceremoniously shoots him — was lifted from Sidaris’ Seven.

Sadly, the history of hardcore outlined in Boogie Nights also applies to softcore: The comparatively high production values and insistence on plot of straight-to-video movies starring former Playmates and Pets (which came to include the “erotic thriller” of the early nineties) gave way to the penny-pinching, plotless dreck we have today on any given night on Cinemax. It’s all honey shot now, from Alien Files to the quasi-Sidarisesque Busty Cops.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old. But I remember softcore being better than it is now, and Andy Sidaris had something to do with that.