Reads the opening crawl of the geopolitical goofball Cuba Crossing, “This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free democratic society.” Hey, that’s me! Maybe it’s you, too, but that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to like it.
Through chunks of mismatched stock footage, the opening depicts the United States’ botched Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. With his fellow soldiers slaughtered, Hudson (Robert Vaughn, Superman III) cries to the heavens, “Damn you, Kennedy!” Then, in present day, Hudson, now in the CIA, travels to Key West, Florida, to get his revenge; one of the film’s alternate titles sums that up succinctly: Assignment: Kill Castro.
To do that, Hudson hires bar owner and charter boat captain Tony (Stuart Whitman, Demonoid) to drop a couple of assassins on the island of Cuba and come back with a box of heroin. Tony agrees and soon after realizing he’s being played, but also enjoys the process — or at least the part of the process that involves being seduced by My Tutor MILF Caren Kaye.
Cuba Crossing unspools with muddled story points that fail to connect, perhaps keeping with the aforementioned crawl referring to the Bay of Pigs event as “confusing and frustrating.” Director Chuck Workman (the guy behind so many time-wasting Academy Awards montages) contributes to this by exhibiting something less than a sure hand; in one scene at Tony’s watering hole, it appears that three movies are being shot at once, what with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You” as a massive bar fight explodes and two significant-sized iguanas crawl on some dumb guy’s head while he just sits there. It’s a mess — both that scene and the movie as a whole.
Co-authoring the screenplay with Workman was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Robin Swicord, who clearly got better. Without much thought into other aspects of the recipe, they throw a lot of ingredients into their soufflé, including cockfighting, black-on-black mortal combat, man-eating sea turtles, the badass Woody Strode (Vigilante) the fine-ass Sybil Danning (Malibu Express) and, as the ultimate villain of the piece says, “that Fourth of July gun bullshit!” —Rod Lott