Skyscraper is a trashy little gem starring one of my foundational crushes, Anna Nicole Smith. An unabashed rip-off of Die Hard, its charm comes from its shamelessness and star. From the opening shot, we see Smith’s hands, with her long fake red nails, grasping the helicopter throttle; we know what we are in for. Or so we think.
Smith and the film are examples of a genre I guess you could call Bimbosploitation. Unlike the term himbo, bimbo is often used derogatorily. I call horse pucky. There aren’t as many entries into this cinematic niche as I’d like, but Smith’s cinematic forays into the cheap and nasty straight-to-video fare must reign among the best.
Raymond Martino is a director unburdened by craftsmanship or technique. Yet, Smith felt more comfortable with him and made most of her films with him. Martino directed Smith’s debut To The Limit, where she played a CIA agent hunting for the vengeance of her murdered lover, Skyscraper, a brash helicopter pilot who finds herself a victim of circumstance and thieves posing as a terrorist, as well as her Playboy softcore video Anna Nicole Smith Exposed.
Martino is not a good director, but he is good for Smith, allowing her a safe space to anchor a tacky, low-budget action movie with more laughs and tawdry chills than any actual suspense. But what makes Skyscraper so watchable is Smith. Not because she’s so bad she’s good, but because of all the actors; she’s the only person onscreen playing a real person, herself. Smith’s Carrie isn’t a character so much as a thinly veiled facade. With her bimbo swagger and charming Texas drawl, Smith makes every scene a reminder that they make everything bigger in Texas.
Most people didn’t flock to Anna Nicole Smith films for high-wire narrative acts. Yet, even here, Martino and Smith zag when you expect them to zig. In Skyscraper and To the Limit, Smith is costumed as her character would be. Her outfits are designed for comfort, not salaciousness. Both films have their gratuitous shower and sex scenes, but between those scenes, Martino treats Smith’s character like any other.
It’s easy to ridicule Smith’s acting. Granted, William Appelgate Jr. and John Larrabee’s script does no one any favors. During an argument with her cop-husband Gordon (Richard Steinmetz,) Smith’s Carrie is forced to utter the howler of a line, “Well, excuse me for still believing in sunny walks in the parks and little babies.” Look, even a seasoned actor would struggle with lines like these.
Appelgate and Larrabee’s script is so rushed that they don’t reveal the bad guy’s motivation until the last fifteen minutes. The duo spends so much time scurrying to copy the action beats from Die Hard and burying them in a plot so convoluted that even the characters seem unsure of their motivations.
Yes, Smith is awful in Skyscraper. Everybody is. The bloodthirsty criminal mastermind Fairfax (Charles M. Huber) is a poor substitute for Hans Gruber. Huber’s Fairfax quotes Shakespeare in between planning heists so needlessly complicated he and his henchmen forget to round up the hostages first. Huber is a Sengalese-German politician, dentist apprentice, and actor who manages to bring an off-kilter menace to Fairfax. Considering how Skyscraper feels written as it was filmed, it’s saying something, even if Huber visibly struggles to get through the Bard’s passages.
Smith, unlike most of Pamela Anderson’s straight-to-video affairs, plays competent, ballsy, leap-first-ask-questions-later characters. She is never the damsel in distress and is highly regarded by the other characters. Even in something like To The Limit, where she’s not even the main character, her Collette still drives the plot.
The aforementioned shower and sex scenes are integral parts of Smith’s movies. In today’s sexless puritanical generation, they might view these scenes as gratuitous and unnecessary. They are. But they’re also some of the best parts. Looking is integral to movies, and part of looking is indulging in the more prurient aspects of our nature.
Besides, compared to most sex scenes, straight to video or otherwise, Martino and Frank Harris’s camera make sure we see Smith’s rapturous face. Yes, Harris’s lens doesn’t ignore her most famous assets, thankfully, but women in sex scenes are so often ignored, visually carved up into pieces, or worse, their pleasure all but excised from the sex scene itself. Yet, Martino and Harris focus on Smith’s enjoyment and put it front and center.
Skyscraper is brutally honest about what it’s here to do. During all the action, Carrie has a flashback of a time when she and her husband made love during a picnic. People often cite this scene as hilariously ill-timed, but on the surface, it makes sense. Martino is visually showing us Carrie’s psychology, her desire to be a mother, and her fear that she may not live to see those dreams realized. Carrie’s last moment with her husband was an interrupted attempt to conceive a child.
The scene is fascinating in that Smith seems uninterested in Steinmetz. Choosing instead to either look at the camera or off to the sides. This probably stems from her being accustomed to being a model, but instead adds a layer of disconnect from the scene. But in so doing, they once again focus on Carie’s pleasure, even as that pleasure becomes enigmatic because of Smith’s eyeliner.
Even in To the Limit, a movie fueled by Joey Travolta’s desire to film a sex scene with Smith, Smith’s body and face is the sole focus and source of eroticism. Perhaps this is why Smith liked working with Martino. The sexiness in her movies didn’t stem from her being an object, but rather a flesh and blood human being who happens to have an amazing rack.
There’s a beat where the squad room sits in silence, eyes towards the door until Gordon comes out, and all the extras start chattering, acting busy. It is at once a gag that is also a clearcut editing mistake, with the beat not meant to be comedic. Instead, it is a shot of the cast of extras waiting for the signal to start acting between scene transitions. The editor didn’t quite get the cut right.
Skyscraper is only barely competent. But it’s the flourishes of Smith and Marinto that keep it captivating. There’s a certain audaciousness in how Martino and Harris’s camera lingers on a hitman’s near orgiastic face as he strangles a man, recalling Barbara Stanwyck’s face from the infamous murder scene of Double Indemnity.
Smith and Martino’s movies were low-down, somewhat sleazy outings. It walks a fine line between Andy Sidaris’s soft-core and sleazy grindhouse. The scene where a henchman attempts to assault Smith’s Carrie is stopped before it begins by her taking a letter opener, stabbing the assailant’s leg, and emptying a magnum into his chest until he falls out of the window.
But the way it wallows in its trashiness gives Skycraper its lusty sheen, how Harris’s camera lingers on the leather-clad rump of one of the henchmen. The cheeky way the film has a token beefcake played by American Gladiator’s own Deron McBee, also known as Malibu. With his long flowing locks, golden tan, and a million-dollar smile, wearing a tight shirt with a deep v-neck, he showcases an impressive amount of man-cleavage not seen since The Babrian Twins ruled the VHS shelves.
Sadly, Skyscraper was the last Anna Nicole vehicle. I often wonder what would have happened if someone like Russ Meyer, Andy Sidaris, or John Waters had worked with her. Smith was unapologetically a bimbo and found ways, for a while, to show how it didn’t have to be a box and that being feminine doesn’t have to mean being weak or merely eye candy.
Skyscraper runs on pure community theater energy. Marinto is hardly a maestro of action scenes, but the shoot-outs are so chaotic, the explosions so massive for a low-budget feature, that you sit there with a cock-eyed grin on your face. In both, To the Limit and Skyscraper, Martino finds an excuse to have a stuntman walk across the screen on fire. This stunt is akin to the old carnival trick of the woman who turns into an ape; even when poorly done, there’s a charm and admiration from the mere attempt.
Images courtesy of FilmRise
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!
