Raunchy, Explosive 80s Action Thriller Is The R-Rated Charlie’s Angels You’ve Been Looking For

By Robert Scucci
| Published 26 seconds ago

As I’ve said in the past, I have a strange relationship with media in the streaming era because I’ll blindly throw on a title that looks intriguing without first digging into its lore and development. While watching 1989’s Savage Beach, my first thought was, “This is a lot like Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987), but if it played more like Charlie’s Angels.” As it turns out, Savage Beach belongs to the same Triple B (Bullets, Bombs, and Babes) film series spearheaded by Andy Sidaris. Other titles in the series, outside of Hard Ticket to Hawaii, include Malibu Express (1985), Picasso Trigger (1988), Day of the Warrior (1996), and even a sequel, Return to Savage Beach (1998) 

If there’s one thing you should know before getting into Savage Beach, or any of the other above-mentioned titles, it’s that these movies are campy, cartoonishly violent, and sexually explicit in the most egregious ways possible. Savage Beach basically plays out like any low-budget action movie you’ve ever seen, but it’s led by a strong female cast that’s scantily clad and always ready for a wardrobe change before unloading countless rounds from their machine guns.

Bullets, Bombs, And Babes

When Savage Beach first introduces us to its ballsy heroines, Donna Hamilton (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton), they’re successfully carrying out a drug bust. They find a cache of cocaine hidden inside decoy pineapples, their guns pop off in a blaze of glory, and it’s immediately established that nobody should mess with them. Then they celebrate in a hot tub with their fellow special agents.

When Donna and Taryn are summoned to deliver vaccines and supplies to the Philippines, they jump at the opportunity, but not before loading up their survival pack with enough firearms to handle any sticky situation. Though Donna and Taryn are exceptional pilots, they’re no match for the brutal storm awaiting their aircraft, prompting them to crash land on a deserted island. Before they get the full lay of the land, they immediately decide to go skinny dipping on the beach.

As luck would have it, a group of mercenaries led by Captain Andres (John Aprea) arrives on the same island in search of buried treasure lost during World War II. Captain Andres knows where to look because he has access to the most sophisticated computer and floppy disk technology that 1989 had to offer. Outnumbered by dangerous men willing to kill anybody who gets in their way, it’s up to Donna and Taryn to take out the enemy, fix their plane, and resume their mission.

Shlock And Awe At Its Finest

As insultingly simple as the plot to Savage Beach may be, Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton steal every single scene they’re in. The mercenary sequences are necessary to establish some semblance of a story, but it’s really the survival scenes that make this thing work. When a rightfully paranoid Donna, sleeping with a machine gun in her lap, is abruptly woken up by a twig snapping in the distance, she opens fire and accidentally decimates a rooster. She shrugs it off and flippantly suggests they need to find a new alarm clock. In the very next scene, she and Taryn are roasting the bird over a fire and eating it like nothing happened, completely unfazed by the fact that they just pumped an innocent rooster full of lead.

Through a modern lens, Savage Beach can absolutely be seen as exploitative, and it’s easy to understand why. You could call this thing Cleavage: The Movie and nobody would argue that it should have a different title. But it’s also a subversion of its era’s action movie tropes because there isn’t a single damsel in distress to be found. Every woman in Savage Beach is a certified badass, independent to a fault, and ready to dive headfirst into danger because they know they can handle anything thrown at them.

With more one-liners than you could possibly count, Savage Beach is good, not-so-clean fun, and that’s entirely the point. It’s Charlie’s Angels with an R-rating, and it’s not trying to be anything else. If that sounds like your kind of trashy action movie night, you can stream it for free on Tubi as of this writing.