Opération panthère noire

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.

You know, it takes a big man to do a good job at a hard task. But it takes an even bigger man to admit he what he cannot do, and then strive to do what he does best. That is Andy Sidaris in a nutshell. True, while he'll never be the next Steven Speilberg, he is truly a master at the task which is presented to him: B-movies. I have only seen three of his films and can tell this already. Enemy Gold is one of them. This film is a slap in the face to those who say that the exploitation of Sex, violence, and rock-&-roll are wrong, and then rubs the slap down with a little ice. What I'm trying to say is, that this movie, while not entirely wholesome, is still a good movie, no matter how you slice it. The enormous juggs are just a way of keeping peoples attention.

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).

"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)

My Sidaris movie streak continues with the 1993 movie "Enemy Gold". Granted, this particular movie sees Andy Sidaris step back and has Christian Drew Sidaris take over the director's chair. But hey, potato potato, right?

"Enemy Gold" is a step back from the original formula, and this particular movie from writers Wess Shannon Rahn and Christian Drew Sidaris just didn't really live up to the expectations set by the numerous many previous movies from writer and director Andy Sidaris. Yet, I managed to sit through the movie in its 92 minutes runtime, but the best thing about this 1993 movie was actually the cover.

The storyline in "Enemy Gold" started out okay, but it quickly escalated into a chaotic mess of a storyline where the red thread went right out the window and the movie felt like director Christian Drew Sidaris was just putting together randomly filmed segments to make a movie.

The movie also has changes to the character gallery, so it lost that particular continuity that the previous movies had going on for it. I have to say that it was nice to see Julie Strain make it to the roster, but given the limitations of the script, then it was not much she had to work with. Sure, there were some familiar faces from previous movies, such as Bruce Penhall and Rodrigo Obregón, but nothing noteworthy.

"Enemy Gold" is not up to par with the previous movies and it is actually a less than mediocre attempt at the genre from director Christian Drew Sidaris.

My rating of "Enemy Gold" lands on a four out of ten stars.