Riptide

I have never liked the films of Kathryn Bigelow, before or after she became such a Hollywood big name director, so Michael Raven's pastiche of her early hit "Point Break" found me in a receptive mood -usually I resent these so-called porn parodies that ripoff mainstream creativity.

Steve Hatcher stars as a cop instructed by his police chief George Kaplan to go undercover and infiltrate a gang of surfers/robbers, led by Alex Sanders. The ensuing antics don't make much sense, especially in the unbelievable plot twists of the later reels, but Raven as usual pursues his final "That's a Wrap!" moment with dogged persistence and perhaps special sets of blinders on.

What should sink the project is the complete absence of surfing ability for this cast. So when Raven does location scenes that closely resemble a real movie, Hatcher and co-stars just flop around in the water, paddling atop their boards out from the beach or instantly wiping out. At no time does anyone, let alone an extra or Surfing Double, actually surf.

Two excellent femme sex performances make the watching worthwhile, notably the familiar face and bod and shoulder tattoo of Chloe Dior, effervescent as an ambiguous character who is both Alex's lover and also seemingly Hatcher's entree into the gang. It is her role that shows the overrated Raven at his worst, not helped by a clumsy script by the untalented DCypher. She is absent from the final reel with a very lame line of dialog to supposedly explain her disappearance from the story, and while present I was unable to discern whether she was indeed another undercover agent/cop or not.

The other leading lady of note is Finnish beauty Karina, a Sin City star of the time, who is one hot bed-mate for Hatcher in the feature's prologue, then stuck in his memory banks after inelegantly being written out of the script (there's that pesky DCypher again) as victim of a drive-by shooting (not shown).

More care in preparation and execution could have made this project a memorable winner. But Raven and company seem to be operating on autopilot, as evidenced by wasting a young Kaylani Lei in a nothing role, and tossing in extraneous sex scenes featuring Randy Spears (he gets zero dialog and no character name in this pointless assignment) and Steven St. Croix (failing at comedy relief as Hatcher's stupid partner). Even Bud Lee, feature's production manager, is largely a cutting room floor victim after acting out his darnedest (see the documentation in the BTS short subject) as a night club owner murdered by Sanders during a holdup.