July 24, 1996

SKYSCRAPER is a DTV movie that nobody would’ve missed if I’d skipped it in this retrospective. But it’s DIE HARD in a building, starring Anna Nicole Smith, and I hadn’t seen it, so I thought I felt I had a responsibility.

Smith had been Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1993, but most of us knew about her because in 1994 she married 89-year-old petroleum billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who died the following year. She wasn’t named in his will and had to go all the way to the Supreme Court failing to get the half of the estate she said he’d promised her, but the world had opinions about what was going on there. (A deeper and truer love than most will ever know.)

Smith got into movies with bit parts in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY and NAKED GUN 33 1/3 (both 1994), which would remain the jewels of her filmography. But SKYSCRAPER wasn’t her first starring role, or even her first action role – PM Entertainment and director Raymond Martino had already used her in TO THE LIMIT (1995). Maybe that’s why she seems a little more comfortable in this role than I expected. Just a little, though.

She plays Carrie Wink, a helicopter pilot for an L.A. business called Heliskort, basically a limo service but for even richer people. She’s kind of like a cab driver too because in at least one scene she’s in the air before she asks the passenger where to take him. I wouldn’t think that would be how it would work, but she seems to know what she’s doing.

When she doesn’t have any clients she goes home to her penthouse apartment for a shower. But she’s not like a troubled military veteran or anything so it’s not the type where you bow your head and brood while the water drips down the scars and tattoos on your back, it’s the opposite type of shower where you tip your head back sexily and display your giant boobs. No time for scrubbing, even. She’s too busy posing to notice somebody sneaking into the shower behind her, but luckily it’s her husband Detective Gordon Wink (Richard Steinmetz, LIQUID DREAMS), so it goes straight from the shower scene to a graphic sex scene in bed. Later when she’s under fire she has a flashback to a time they did target practice together and then had sex on a picnic blanket.

But she wants nothing more than to give up this liberated lifestyle to have babies (plural) and throws a tantrum that he doesn’t want to yet. There’s an okay joke that he needs a ride to work so she flies him in the copter and purposely makes the ride scary. (Is the implication that she keeps the helicopter at their apartment?)

Meanwhile, some South African asshole named Fairfax (Charles Huber, ENEMY MINE) is trying to get ahold of some deadly weapon, and the CIA is involved or something? He has three of the four parts to the device (like infinity stones) and hires Carrie to bring him and some of his men to the 86-story Zitex building to get the fourth by doing the whole DIE HARD scenario including taking the place of the security guy at the front desk, having a computer expert and negotiating with a douchebag hostage. Get a load of the Ellis stand-in’s tucked-in polo:

Anyway Carrie is supposed to wait for them on the roof but her antenna broke and she gets out to use the phone and runs into this guy Cranston (Eugene Robert Glazer, HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, INTRUDER, SCANNER COP II), who gives her a suitcase with the device. But don’t worry, she’s tough – she’s from Texas. (I kinda like that as far as I picked up on they don’t give more of an explanation than that for why she can handle herself.)

I like that there’s a variety of henchman styles. A couple generic sunglasses dudes, a leather duster dude, a guy with dreadlocks, a guy with long straight hair and an accent, a muscle guy in tank top and leather pants, another one with long hair like Tarzan, and then this Sarah Connor lady:

The Tarzan guy is funny because he has such big muscles but he seems to just shoot guns. They really should have had him throw some logs or something, otherwise what’s the point of working out so much?

I counted six rockets launched in this movie – many of them the same shot re-used, but that’s still more rockets than most movies have.

One complication that does not happen in DIE HARD is that some lady brought her kid to work and he’s riding around on a Big Wheel like Danny in THE SHINING. Unfortunately that’s so Carrie can practice motherhood by being nice to a kid, not so she can do a stunt involving a Big Wheel. But being a PM Entertainment production obviously there’s a decent amount of mayhem, including a bunch of big falls and some fire stunts and some dangling from cables. There are many obvious stunt doubles including ones that look like men playing Carrie, but it could just be the combination of a blond wig and the bulky clothes the character wears. Anyway, there are also plenty of parts where it’s clearly really her doing small things like falling down or whatever but it always seems impressive. There are many shots where she’s clearly in a helicopter that’s really in the air. That’s where they got the idea for TOP GUN: MAVERICK.

She shows her boobs again when she pretends to give in to the tank top guy’s sexual aggression, only to stab him with a switchblade and shoot him so he falls out the window. I did not find it surprising that she’d have to be degraded like that when starring in a movie, but I do give SKYSCRAPER credit for having her cop husband show up but never take over the action. He gets hurt and she finds him and they embrace and she says “Listen, I gotta go check on the hostages” and he just waits for her. He knows his place.

I can’t really recommend this one. It’s definitely not good and it’s not consistently fun-bad, but there is some novelty to this living caricature of femininity talking tough in her brash Texan accent and running around in a baggy flight jacket shooting guns and occasionally doing a roundhouse kick. That’s unusual enough to make it stand out a little from other movies of similar quality level.

The building was the Wells Fargo Building, now FourFortyFour South Flower. It also appears in HEAT, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., BEVERLY HILLS COP II, 52 PICK-UP, WEDLOCK and LIONHEART and was the Baxter Building in the Roger Corman FANTASTIC FOUR.

Screenwriters William Applegate Jr. & Joseph John Barmettler would later do the Gary Daniels Christmas action movie RIOT. Smith and director Martino would reunite for the 1998 documentary EXPOSED: ANNA NICOLE SMITH. Her only other starring role was ILLEGAL ALIENS, released after she died. Joanie “Chyna” Laurer played the villain.