Enemy Gold

Another cheap and silly thriller from the Andy Sidaris stable, this one actually made by his son. Julie Strain, the pneumatic scream queen of the 1990s, co-stars. The story is about the usual wooden good guy agents battling criminals and at the same time uncovering a cache of civil war gold, leading to more action. The only emphasis is on pin up models wearing very little, and it's all rather silly, although fairly well shot for its budget.

A bit strange to see this is made in 1993 and doesn't come out ofthe eighties. Maybe that's the reason I just came across this T&A flick.

This is a perfect example of a flick were acting isn't the main thing. You make a cheap flick with bad acting, a lot of T&A, some action and a hell of a sleeve to put on your VHS release so it would be picked up easy at a rental shop.

Starts okay and the use of yellow lettering in the opening credits do say enough, this is a B-movie. Well I said starts okay, but after 1 minute the horse scene takes ages and when we move over to nowadays, the attack at the house, so cheesy. Standing in front of a door with glass and not be seen, really. And when the chick comes in the first fight scene, OMG.

Yep, y ou guessed it, this is one for the boys full of stuffed tits easy to spot. Two Playboy playmates are in it, do I need to say more?

Today this kind of flick can't be made anymore, politically incorrect, girls are just used for sex and need to be sexy. If you come out of the grindhouse era pick it up, if ypu are a millenium, skip it.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 2,5/5 Effects 0,5/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

"Enemy Gold" marks a turning point in Andy Sidaris' filmography: his son Christian is sitting in the director's chair, and Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez and Cynthia Brimhall are gone. The female lead this time is Suzi Simpson, and she is quite a find (I wonder why Sidaris didn't use her again): she has a great body (no matter what angle you look at it from), combined with a sweet, innocent face and a cute smile; she is appealing in the same way that Hope Marie Carlton was, plus she fights a bit more than other Sidaris heroines. Tai Collins, as a higher-in-command agent, is another total knockout, and Julie Strain, as an assassin-for-hire, is like a mythological Amazon come to life. Looking at this woman is much better than listening to her - her delivery turns her character into camp. The pacing of the movie lags in the second half, and when it's all over you have the feeling (as with other Sidaris movies) that it could have been much better. But what is there on the screen is still enjoyable - some of the lines are funny and all of the women are sexy. (**1/2)

This is the 9th out of my 12 reviews for the works of Andy Sidaris, in chronological order. For the first time, he only produced the movie, but left the director's job to his son Drew, who had regularly been director's assistant before. Renting a video cassette of „Enemy Gold" was my start into the world of „bullets, bombs and babes" many years ago and it still is a pleasure to revisit!

The story is simple: Three agents discover a bunch of drug smugglers, kill a few and put the rest in jail. The big boss is not amused and sends a killer to eliminate the agents. The interesting twist is that the agents are treasure hunting on their „day off": they find a map that leads to lost gold from the civil war. The historical flashbacks make the movie a bit more interesting, because the rest is quite predictable. Fortunately, we have familiar faces with Mark Barriere and Bruce Penhall who play the good guys, plus Julie Strain as Jewel Panther (sic!), the killer. Debutante Suzi Simpson plays an agent by the equally unlikely name of Becky Midnite, and Suzi follows the footsteps of Dona Speir quite well for a first try. Remember, Dona appeared in no less than 7 of Sidaris' movies before and seemed impossible to replace! Alan Abelew deserves mentioning; he plays Dickson, a man you love to hate. If you ever worked for a boss like that, you know what I mean. „Enemy Gold" has a simple instrumental rock guitar soundtrack, a bit different from the style of most predecessors. Don't miss the documentary „Let's make a Sidaris movie" (bonus on the American DVD), because it explains how the members of the whole family worked together to make a movie - not an ordinary film team.

Having worked as Second Unit Director on a fair few of his father's trashy T&A action films, Drew Sidaris finally gets a crack at writing and directing his own feature, Enemy Gold, which sees a trio of government agents suspended from work by a corrupt official, discovering a stolen horde of Civil War gold while on vacation, and fighting for their lives against a vengeful Colombian drug-lord and his cohorts.

Sidaris Jr. starts afresh with new characters, a (mostly) new cast and a change of location, but doesn't exactly break new ground, using the 'hot women, guns and explosions' formula that has proved so successful for his old man; but despite his best efforts at emulating dear dad's style, Drew clearly hasn't been paying enough attention to the finer details...

Unforgivably, it is a whole 10 minutes before he gets any of his ladies naked (Andy would never have allowed that); 20 minutes have gone by before there is a gratuitous hot-tub scene; and the film is almost over by the time we get the movie's sole soft-core sex scene. Worse still, Drew offers no radio-controlled scale model action, no comedy hit-men, and no squib-tastic bullet hits.

Kudos to Drew for casting Playboy playmates Suzi Simpson and Tanquil Lisa Collins, both of whom are stunning, and also for having Julie Strain (as assassin Jewel Panther) wave a sword around by firelight, wearing nothing but a few leather straps, but pretty much everything else about this film fails to entertain, making it one of the weakest films in my Girls, Guns and G-Strings box set (so far).