Terrorists have taken over the Miss Galaxy beauty contest and it is up to the show's host, martial arts star Sharon Bell (Shannon Tweed) to defeat them and save the contestants.
A Canadian production, No Contest is not particularly good or exciting, but it rides the line thanks to competent deployment of narrative and character cliches, and some interesting swerves.
I want to emphasize that this movie is not technically a ‘good’ movie, but it never veers off into technical incompetence or the singularity of outsider art like The Room.
This is entirely subjective, but from my perspective the movie is watchable because of low expectations.
The movie is a fairly predictable rip of Die Hard - except it makes enough changes to justify its limited resources. It is also the only Die Hard riff I have seen based around a woman. And Andrew Dice Clay is not bad as the urbane villain.
The cast are all over the place, but all within a similar bandwidth. Shannon Tweed is pretty wooden in the lead, but she does not take you out of the movie. Robert Davi is solid as her man on the outside. And Roddy Piper is perfectly cast as a scumbag villain.
The action is fairly low-key, but I spent the movie impressed by how many different parts of the hotel the film managed to show. The movie is small, but they ring as much scope as they can out of the limited canvas. And the filmmakers do not exploit Tweed’s previous career in erotic thrillers - indeed, they use the tease of nudity as a misdirect to get the action started.
It’s not great, but as an exercise in making the most of what you have, it is interesting.
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