by Felicia Feaster

iss March 1984 Dona Speir has fond memories of secret agent Donna Hamilton, her gun-toting, breast-flashing B-movie alter ego in films like Savage Beach. That 1989 film featured a typically ludicrous, action-heavy plotline that teamed Speir's Donna with Playmate Hope Marie Carlton as agent Taryn Kendall. In a spin on the 1968 Lee Marvin-Toshiro Mifune thriller Hell in the Pacific, the comely agents are marooned on a remote island where they vie with some unsavory criminals for a treasure guarded by a Japanese soldier stranded on the island since WWII.

L.A. Goddess

"They were B-films: shoot 'em up, T and A," Speir recalls of such projects. "But my character was very strong. She was never a victim; she was always the one getting the bad guys. A lot of times in a lot of horror and T-and-A films you see the girls being beat up or tied up and that was never it.

"I always came out the winner and the champion, and whipped the guy or I dumped the guy. And I always had the biggest gun!" Speir laughs.

Video may have killed the radio star, but it proved a real boon to Playmates of the Eighties, who played a not-insignificant role in that decade's video revolution. Gone were the days of drive-ins, Times Square grindhouses and second-tier small-town movie houses featuring the work of B-movie directors. In the Eighties, films that once would have played on drive-in screens instead were being churned out as direct-to-video releases viewers could watch in the privacy of their own homes.

Without question, Andy Sidaris was the king of that video market. His films, which were aimed at foreign audiences and released directly to video in America, followed a perennial formula of babes and big explosions. His Malibu Bay Films productions of the Eighties -- Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Savage Beach, Picasso Trigger and Malibu Express -- featured 12 Playmates, including Speir, Patty Duffek, Roberta Vasquez, Donna Smith, Hope Marie Carlton, Cynthia Brimhall, Kym Malin, Lorraine Michaels, Lynda Wiesmeier, Barbara Edwards and Kimberly McArthur. The videotape cover art spoke the international language of S-E-X, generally featuring several well-endowed Playmates toting enough firepower to intimidate even the NRA.

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