No Contest
1994, Starring Shannon Tweed, Robert Davi, Andrew Dice Clay, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. Directed by Paul Lynch.
Tweet
Paul Lynch's No Contest is a campy take off on Die
Hard starring Shannon Tweed (in a rare, clothed role) as a
kick boxing ex-beauty queen. Lynch (Prom Night, Bullies)
manages to go through a record number of squibs in this violent
straight-to-video effort made in Toronto.
Something's rotten at the "Ms Galaxy" pageant. Ex-Ms Galaxy and current
B-movie star of films like "Tae Kwon Doll," Sharon Bell (Tweed) is
hosting the event at a swanky hotel. Between watching shots of the
girls changing in and out of their pageant clothes, she finds time to
flirt with pockmarked personal bodyguard Crane (as played by Robert
Davi). Crane has been hired by Ms America's father, a senator, to
protect his little girl from the dangers of the international pageantry
circuit. Hey, you never know when some crazed maniac will take a beauty
pageant hostage!
Suddenly, a crazed maniac takes a beauty pageant hostage. When
Crane
steps out for a smoke, a flower delivery van drives into a loading bay
of the hotel. Two men make their way to the stage, shooting security
guards along the way. Just as the winner is announced, one of the men
(Oz, as played by Andrew Dice Clay), goes on stage and presents the
winner with flowers. Then he pulls out his gun and shoots her in cold
blood. The place erupts, and the audience is allowed to escape while Oz
locks the doors and hustles the contestants (including Sharon) together
into one of the luxury suites. To discourage any thoughts of escape, Oz
puts complex digital wristbands on the girls. If any of the wristbands
stray to far from the others, it explodes. To prove this to the
audience, Ms Germany runs out of the room and, well, explodes.
Oz's monosyllabic henchmen include Vic, Ice, Cal, Q and Zed. Besides
the Diceman, you'll immediately recognize Roddy Piper as Ice, but
there's some Canadians lurking in there too Cal is played by
the same oddly coifed actor that played Johnny on that laughable
Canadian Fame rip-off Catwalk,
and Vic is better known these days as Davinci from CBC's Davinci's
Inquest.
Outside of the hotel, the cops have all arrived, and Crane (who was
locked out) starts working with them on a way to penetrate the hotel's
security. They get a call from Oz, who tells them that he wants $10
million in diamonds in return for the safety of his hostages. When the
cops send in two unfortunate officers to try and stop them, Cal and Zed
use a remote controlled machine gun to blow them away from the safety
of the basement control room.
Upstairs, Oz deactivates the wristband on one of the girls and
takes
her to an adjacent bedroom. We soon learn that this is Oz's girlfriend
and that she is in on the plan. Seeing seduction as a possibility for
escape, Sharon comes on to Vic and, after getting him to deactivate her
wristband, leads him down into the hotel pool. After a little foreplay,
she kicks him into said pool, grabbing his gun and cell phone. In a
vacant stairwell she calls Crane and he explains that she has to get to
the control room to deactivate the wristbands and the building's
defenses. She climbs into an air duct to avoid detection by the
security cameras, and happens to see Oz and his girlfriend plotting
their diamond-studded escape.
Just when she begins piecing everything together, she realizes that her
explosive wristband has been remotely re-activated. She quickly exits
into an adjacent room and calls Crane, who walks her through the steps
needed to take off the wristband without setting it off.
Meanwhile, a wet and embarrassed Vic makes his way to the control room,
and tells Cal how Sharon tricked him. Oz is there waiting for him and
rewards him with a bullet in the chest. On the security cameras, Cal
finds Sharon sneaking around in the kitchen and sends Ice and Zed after
her. Still making her way to the control room, Sharon escapes from Ice
and shoots Zed dead. She also discovers that the flower van is full of
explosives. When she finally arrives in the basement, she ties Cal to a
hot water pipe and blows out all the control room computers. Via
walkee-talkee, Oz tells Sharon to get upstairs before he shoots another
beauty queen. She quickly high-tails it to the suite, but the damage
has been done the bracelets and the defenses have been
turned off and the cops storm the building. But that's still not the
end of this film. Oz has wired his pulse into the bombs so that if his
heart stops, they will explode. The senator has arrived with the
diamonds, and Crane learns the rest of the facts Oz used to
work for the Senator, and is really after revenge.
Unlike other Paul Lynch films, which tend to approach their
subject
with a more or less straight face, No Contest is
filled with in-jokes which depend on the viewer taking a somewhat
detached view of the film. Lynch is aware his films are violent, and
this film was made just after his appearance on Donahue where he
defended the violence in his film Bullies. As a
snide comment on this, Ms Germany says in her pageant speech that
"
violence in films must not destroy family values." That is before she
blows up, of course. "Rowdy" Roddy Piper watches professional wrestling
on TV, a nod to his roots as the original bad man with a kilt, and lets
not forget that Shannon Tweed plays the almost identically named
"
Sharon Bell," a star of B-movies.
The most annoying aspect of No Contest has to be
the music. The virtually non-stop score is intrusive and not
particularly suspenseful. Sticklers on such things as "plot logic" or
even "believability" may also be disappointed with No Contest,
while others may laugh at the improbable concept of the action movie
star who can actually fight in real life. At one point, Cal refers to
Sharon as "Bruce Lee with boobs," and I think that this statement was
probably tossed around in a boardroom when this film was being
green-lighted. And it seems to be a successful formula, because Lynch
followed up this film with No Contest 2.
