Max and Cheese
In which the author bites into the bittersweet Proustian madeleine of a youthful gig picking T&A movies for a major pay cable service.
Every week I check the new movies arriving on the major streaming platforms – and by “new” I mean whatever movie from whatever year has just appeared on a service – in order to cherry-pick goodies for you, dear subscribers. Last week, as I was checking the offerings on Amazon, I found my eyeballs skidding to a halt at two titles: “Malibu Express” (1985) and “Hard Ticket to Hawaii” (1987). Here’s where the screen goes woobly (technical term), signaling we’re going into a flashback or that the writer has just been hit with post-traumatic vapors, or, in this case, both.
“Hard Ticket to Hawaii”! “Malibu Express”! The tawdry oeuvre of writer-director Andy Sidaris, auteur of boobs, brawn and bullets, flickers before my eyes, whisking me back down the Time Tunnel to the late 1980s, when I worked for Home Box Office and my job – one of them, anyway – was to pick the craptacular softcore T&A movies that played on Cinemax on Friday nights.
Yes. It’s true. I was the Skinemax guy.
