If you’re a certain type of B-movie lover, the name Andy Sidaris is synonymous with a series of sexy action films he made from 1985–1998, often referred to as a collective by the appropriately saucy sobriquet, “Bullets, Bombs, and Babes.” For years before his foray into making B-movies though, Sidaris was a legend in sports broadcasting. From ABC’s Wide World of Sports to the Olympics, the man directed all the big events. One accomplishment during this part of his career pointed towards his lucrative future in exploitation movies. Sidaris basically invented what came to be known as the “honey shot”—a close-up of buxom cheerleaders or smoking hot women in the stands at sporting events. So it’s no surprise that Sidaris became the king of hardboiled soft core action flicks in the ‘80s and ‘90s, packing his movies with as many honey shots as he could cram into their ninety minute runtimes.
I’ve always enjoyed Sidaris’s films, but lemme tell ya, no one watches them for their plots. Usually they revolve around absurdly hot men and women—pure physical specimens at their finest—some playing federal agents, some as drug dealers and other assorted baddies, all in a constant power struggle. Good guys versus bad guys stuff, that’s about all you need to know about narratives. The reason people watch them is succinctly described in the filmmaker’s Wikipedia entry: “These films featured a rotating ‘stock company’ of actors mostly made up of Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets, such as Julie Strain, Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Cynthia Brimhall, Roberta Vasquez, Julie K. Smith, Shae Marks, and Wendy Hamilton.”
The women weren’t just eye candy though. The men were often comically overconfident, allowing these sharp-shooting broads to one-up them regularly. The Babes were pistol-packing stars, participating in all the wild action scenes, often while wearing only bikinis or lingerie and high heels, which added a high degree of difficulty to their work that the guys didn’t have to worry about. To paraphrase the famous line from This is Spinal Tap, the male gaze goes to eleven in Andy Sidaris movies.
Of all the bodacious Babes in the Sidaris arsenal, one always reigned supreme for me: Dona Speir. The shapely blonde bombshell with legs to die for was Playboy Playmate of the Month for March 1984. After several years of modeling and acting gigs, she became a fixture in the Bullets, Bombs, and Babes universe (the same actors and characters popped up in multiple films, creating what you might call the “Sidarisverse”). Dona starred in seven of these films as the gun-toting, no-nonsense federal drug enforcement agent Donna Hamilton. Dona added an “n” to her name and became a true action-adventure star, right alongside her fellow Sidaris babes-in-arms, who are basically like Charlie’s Angels, but if Charlie’s Angels packed oozies and took their clothes off all the time.
What made Dona Speir so attractive to me in these films—from Picasso Trigger to Guns to Fit to Kill and every other one she was in—wasn’t just her obvious physical beauty and stone cold foxiness, or that she went topless in many of the movies (although none of that hurt one bit), but also the way she seemed so capable and determined as Agent Hamilton. Like any actor in a Sidaris movie, Dona wasn’t winning any awards, but she recited the groan-worthy, dripping-with-cheese dialogue in a sexy deadpan style that was music to my ears. Dona’s seeming boredom with or indifference to the shenanigans in these movies was sexy as hell. She perfected the bored bikini babe, plus threw herself into the action scenes with abandon and always made sure to pose seductively with large firearms, often while in her underwear. Just like real federal agents do.
It’s tough to narrow down my favorite Sidaris flicks with Dona, but Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Hard Hunted—so much hardness!—Guns, and Fit to Kill are pretty great. Hell, in Hard Hunted she tosses a bad guy out of a moving plane, then drops a live grenade in the cockpit and parachutes out just before the pilot and the plane are blown to smithereens. But all of her Sidaris movies are great. And by great, I mean full of beautiful models like Dona doing cool things like blowing up airplanes.
Dona Speir eventually left acting behind and became a motivational speaker and personal growth counselor. She also wrote a memoir detailing how, as a teenager, she fell prey to one of the most prolific predators of our time: Bill Cosby. Yes, America’s rapist scumbag dad himself. Dona was sixteen when Cosby took her under his wing, ostensibly to help with her dream of being in show biz. Soon enough he was pumping the underage girl full of alcohol and drugs, and coercing her into servicing him as needed. This went on for several years.
“She said she was too scared to tell her parents the truth as the sleazy funnyman allegedly arranged for her to take trips with him and squirreled her away in hotel suites, where she said she would satisfy the creep’s cravings.” That’s from an article and interview with Speir from several years ago, and it’s a chilling read. Discovering that Speir survived this trauma and dedicated her life to recovery, and to helping others along that path, gave me an entirely new appreciation for her. Then I chatted with her on social media a handful of times a few years back and she was warm and funny, and seemed appreciative of her fans. This made me love her even more.
Dona, Julie Strain, Roberta Vasquez and the other Babes of Bullets, Bombs, and Babes fame have attained legendary cult status among B-movie aficionados. Just the mere mention of their names sends us into passionate ramblings about their work with Sidaris and beyond. Besides the Babes though, there were also some bigger names, often in juicy bad guy parts. Erik Estrada (CHiPs) and Pat Morita (Happy Days, Karate Kid) and Danny Trejo (Heat) in one of his earliest roles leap to mind.
But it’s Dona and the rest of the Sidaris stable of Babes who made these movies memorable to a legion of fans. And we are legion. I’ve met many fans over the years, several of whom are my best friends. One even wrote his own beautiful ode to Bullets, Bombs, and Babes (which I would share a link to here, but he took his blog offline, so I can’t). These movies came out smack in the middle of a fertile period for sexy, high-octane entertainment aimed squarely at the male libido—and not just straight dudes; many of my gayest friends adore these movies. This was the era of the glorious Silk Stalkings TV series, which I stayed up late to watch all through the nineties. So many erotic thrillers were released, onscreen and direct-to-video, that we were practically tripping over them. Sex sells, after all, and it sold like hotcakes back then.
A handful of years ago I found a like-new copy of Girls, Guns, and G-Strings, the twelve film DVD collection of Sideris flicks. I only paid $8 for it. A steal! There are at least two Sideris complete DVD or Blu-ray sets out there, and I don’t really know the differences between them (the other is called, appropriately, Bullets, Bombs, and Babes). Many of the individual films have also been released on Blu-ray or can be found streaming at sites like Tubi. Revisiting some of these movies when I got the box set, ages after I’d first seen them, was quite a trip. Their “Miami Vice on steroids hard bodies” approach is downright ridiculous, just like it was back then. I still find these movies incredibly fun—if also very stupid—entertainment, for the same reasons I love other B-movie genres, from horror to sci-fi and more. They’re wildly retrograde today, and you can either dismiss them for that or roll your eyes at how forthright they are in their unabashed excess of explosions, firearms, car crashes, and thongs.
Speaking of thongs, Dona Speir was really good at wearing one while firing large weaponry. Rewatching her movies, I was reminded of that teenage crush I had on her, and pleasantly surprised to realize it’s still intact. After a harrowing few years as a teenager, she went on to become an international model who acted in television and movies for a time, then segued into other professions which allowed her to pursue her real passions for helping other survivors of abuse and drug and alcohol addiction. So, now when I see her onscreen as Donna Hamilton, I realize she was struggling with addiction for at least some of the years she made those movies. I also hope I wasn’t objectifying her too much when I was first watching her and the other Babes’ movies on USA Up All Night, or on VHS back in the ‘90s. I was a teenage boy, after all, and we know they’re all degenerates and perverts.
That was clearly the intent of these movies, to create a fantasy world of insanely hot women who ran and jumped and fought and fired big weapons while dressed like Playmates. As a teenager I knew this and just thought, “Cool!” Now I see it within a larger historical context and still think, “Cool!” I see nothing wrong with finding the sexy frivolity fun, because the movies are completely fantastical, despite being set in the real world. They’re absurdist works of lowbrow art that starred ass-kicking women at a time when most action stars were only allowed to be men. And just because Dona and the Babes were dressed for the male gaze doesn’t mean there weren’t women gazing at them too (plus Sidaris’ business partner and wife Arlene played a huge role in making these movies). No matter what their outfits (or lack thereof), they were usually portrayed as strong and proficient at their jobs on either side of the law.
It’s weird and fascinating how B-movies stars like Dona Speir become such inspirations to so many, but it’s an undeniably common theme connecting various exploitation genres and their fans. Dona Speir exists in a place in my mind reserved for the B-movie crushes of my youth, alongside Rhonda Shear, Julie Strain, Mary Woronov, and Linnea Quigley, to name a few. Dona made some entertaining films years ago, but her fascinating life and post-movie career prove she’s more than the fictional federal agent who fought crime in a g-string. She’s been a model, an actor, a recovering alcoholic, a survivor of abuse, and a counselor helping others overcome addiction and trauma.
So, yeah, I still like Dona Speir, but these days it’s for more than just being my favorite Babe of the Bullets, Bombs, and Babes movies. It’s also because she’s a survivor. In one way or another, we’re all survivors. That’s why she endures for fans like me. As another favorite of mine, Heather Langenkamp, says in A Nightmare on Elm Street, “I’m into survival.”
Major thanks go out to our resident Babe here at the Starfire Lounge, Yvette, for unearthing this draft, which was buried deep within the Lounge’s cavernous archives. Seriously, I wrote almost the entire post four years ago and, for reasons unknown, never got around to publishing it. Thanks to Yvette’s diligence and hard work, I’ve done some mild editing to get it to this final form you see now.
Yvette: Monsieur, ze Bullets, Bombs, and Babes reminds me of my time as a sexy, globetrotting spy. Doing all ze dangerous zings while wearing a thong was part of ze job requirement, so I can relate to Dona’s plight.
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