Director: Raymond Martino
Cast: Anna Nicole Smith, Joey Travolta, John Aprea, Michael Nouri

A number of years ago, I sat down and watched the comedy The Heartbreak Kid - the original 1972 version with Charles Grodin, not the lame 2007 remake with Ben Stiller. While I thought it was a very funny (if dark at times) movie, the moment I remember most from it was the final scene. [Spoilers ahead.] In the last scene of the movie, the Grodin character had minutes earlier achieved the goal that he was pursuing for most of the movie running time, which was to marry the seemingly unobtainable Cybill Shepherd character. However, instead of being in a gleeful mood, the last shot of the movie showed him sitting at the sidelines of the wedding party looking bewildered and forlorn. I instantly understood why Grodin's character looked so dejected - now that he had achieved his long-desired goal, he had no idea of what to do next, and up to his wedding he has simply been living for the pursuit. Although the movie was fiction, I could see that this type of "what now?" moment happens more often than you might think to real life people. One example can be the Olympic Games that happen every few years. How many times have you seen true stories of athletes in training who have the goal of not only participating in the Olympics, but bagging one or more medals after participating in them? I've always wondered for many medal winners what on earth they subsequently do after the Olympics. For some athletes, there don't seem to be many choices available after winning a medal at the Olympics. Take gymnast Mary Lou Retton, for example, who won five medals at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. After her triumph at the Olympics, she had some endorsement deals, and a few cameos in movies, but aside from all that, she hardly went on to bigger and better things. There doesn't seem to be a big job market for gymnasts. Indeed, by the 2020s, her slowly crumbling personal life had given her some big health and legal problems that she wasn't long prepared for.

Cartoonist Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) once said in effect that when you do become successful, you have to work even harder once you reach any new level of success. I certainly think that is true, but I also think that there are certain goals that, once are reached, are near or total dead ends towards achieving any kind of further success. One such dead end goal that a number of women have had since the 1950s is to be a centerfold in Playboy magazine, a goal that since I was a kid has kind of bewildered me. I won't get into the fact that I've always wondered why any woman would have the goal of showing her nakedness to millions of men, but I will get into the fact that I've seen many times that it doesn't lead to much - if anything - for the particular woman afterwards. There are exceptions, of course; Diane Hendricks used the opportunity to subsequently work towards and get a lucrative position in a large buildings material business, and others used their opportunity to become writers or get in the journalism sector. But many others have found that posing for Playboy doesn't lead to great things.  One woman who posed for Playboy thought that the opportunity would open a lot of doors for her, but to her disappointment, the gig only led to one job offer - to act in a pornographic movie. While many Playboy Playmates dream of stardom on the screen, I'm sure most of them would not degrade themselves in hard core pornographic films... though opportunities in more "legit" movie productions do seem few and far between. Again, there are exceptions. One of the more famous exceptions is with Shannon Tweed. After posing for Playboy, she subsequently had a fairly respectable career in movies and television shows. While many of these productions she was in were of the "B" movie variety (such as the movie Of Unknown Origin), she also had appearances in soap operas and major prime time television shows. A look at her resume shows she worked very steadily in film and TV for over thirty years, something you can't say for many actresses.

But for the majority of Playboy Playmates who decide to give acting a try, more often than not their acting resumes end up being just a fraction of a size compared to Tweed's. There seem to be two main reasons for this. First, major Hollywood studios are almost always reluctant to cast Playmates in "A" movies and television shows. Since what Playmates are offered (if offered anything at all) are low budget productions, often the end results are bad, and in Hollywood, few casting agencies are interested in actresses who are associated with bad movies. The second reason is that Playmates more often than not are terrible at acting. I submit to you the Playmate known as Anna Nicole Smith as an example of this. Her acting was absolutely atrocious. I first came aware of this when I watched the PM Entertainment production Skyscraper, and her "performance" in the movie went way beyond typically bad, instead drifting right in the middle of agonizingly surreal. I recently thought about watching the movie again so I could prove why Playmates tend to have shabby acting careers after posing for Playboy, but a search on the Internet showed that the movie is fairly well known among B movie fans. So instead, I decided to review another PM Entertainment production with Smith, that being To The Limit which is much less known. In this movie, Smith plays a former CIA agent (!) named Vickie Lynn, who is now living a quiet life of retirement with her beau Thomas "China" Smith (Michael Nouri, Psychic). At the start of the movie, the couple is preparing to attend the wedding of a fellow company man named Frank Davinci (Joey Travolta, Hunter's Blood). However, as the couple are preparing to drive to Frank's wedding, Thomas is blown up by a bomb in the couple's car, and a panicking and distraught Vickie immediately goes on the run. Around the same time Frank's wedding is interrupted when gunmen appear and open fire on Frank and his new bride. Frank is wounded, but his bride is killed. Subsequently when Frank is hospitalized and then placed into hiding by an old mobster friend named Philly (John Aprea, Matt Houston), Frank, Philly, and Philly's goons put the pieces together and figure out an especially bad C.I.A. operative by the name of Arthur Jameson (Jack Bannon, Lou Grant) has been up to the killings, due to some dirty dealings years earlier involving Arthur, Frank, and Thomas. Around the same time, Vickie makes an appearance to Frank, and offers to assist with Frank's quest for justice and revenge. Will Vickie eventually offer to give "something else" to Frank? What do you think?

Well, if you don't know the answer to that last question, let me inform you that Travolta not only is credited as one of the producers of To The Limit, he also acted as one of the three credited screenwriters. If you are wondering if the movie is chock full of sexy stuff besides that particular moment, let me assure you that the movie does go the extra mile, even if more often than not it seems gratuitous. In the opening few minutes of the movie, we see Vickie Lynn... uh... "enjoying herself" in a hot tub, then minutes later has a sex scene with her husband. Frank's bachelor party has not one, but two topless strippers jiggling their assets, and a female assassin later in the movie makes sure to take off her top before dispatching her target. Towards the end of the movie, just before her sex scene with Frank, Vickie Lynn washes herself again, this time in a shower, while using a shower gun to... uh... enjoy the awesome to behold experience. Except for the sex scene between Vickie Lynn and Frank - which is kind of creepy to watch, because Frank looks old enough to be Vickie Lynn's father - the movie does definitely get a passing grade when it comes to soft core spectacle. Anna Nicole Smith does definitely give it her all in these intimate moments, but how is she when she keeps on her clothes? Well, about the kindest thing I can say is that her performance is an improvement over the ghastly acting she gave in Skyscraper, but not by much. Here she isn't as whiny as in that other movie, but her line readings are still pretty bad. Her tone of voice almost always sounds the same flat and emotionless manner. But she also isn't convincing when it comes to things like posture and body moments. Her physical actions are more often than not awkward and forced, especially when she has to do things like fire guns or engage in hand-to-hand combat, most likely due to the "gigantic assets" Smith possessed. All in all, you will never believe for a minute that this woman she's playing could be a former government agent.

But Smith shouldn't have felt too bad about her poor performance, mainly because few of the other actors in To The Limit bother to put a professional slant on their acting. The one actor who comes off best in the movie is John Aprea as the mob boss. Though confined greatly by the movie's screenwriting and direction, he all the same manages to make his mobster character have a likable and even sympathetic edge; you don't see that often with Mafioso characters in movies. He comes off much better than the three other prominent male actors in the movie. Though Joey Travolta was only 45 years old when he made this movie, his white facial hair and grey thinning hair on his scalp make him look like he's in his early 60s, which not only helps ruin his sex scene with Smith (who he has absolutely no chemistry with, by the way), but makes him an extremely unconvincing action hero. It doesn't help he also acts as old and tired as he looks. The actor playing his chief adversary, Jack Bannon, doesn't make much of an impression, one reason being that the screenplay doesn't give him much more to do than looking at computer screens and growl one-liners. He's also in much less of the movie than you might think, disappearing several times for long periods. The screenplay gives even less than what it gives Bannon when it comes to the prominently billed Michael Nouri; it's clear than all of his footage was shot in less than a day, and his performance in this little footage clearly shows this project was simply a quick cash grab for him. The little screen time for Bannon and Nouri is odd in a way, because the screenplay isn't just badly written for their characters (and the others as well, as you'll quickly see), the story is way off the mark when it comes to pacing. In the first twenty minutes of To The Limit, there is hardly a thing when it comes to introducing and fleshing out the characters of Vickie Lynn and Frank, despite the two being the central characters. We don't learn too much more about them after that point, and the two characters only first meet thirty minutes later, when half of the running time has passed. Then strangely, after they do finally meet and promise to pool their resources together and find who killed their spouses, they subsequently do almost nothing towards actually investigating the situation and making plans to get themselves out of hot water.

Though while that plot thread is mighty slow in being executed, other plot threads hamper the movie, albeit for different reasons. There are plot points about Frank's young niece, one of Philly's goons having an eye for the ladies despite being married, the going-ons of Frank's co-workers and friends... there are too many extraneous details in this screenplay! And when the movie does change its focus on the main plot concerning the two leads battling their nemesis, it never quite makes complete sense. Stories about what happened in the past are vague, and present-day motivations of the villain are also not that clear. I can't say I was too surprised by the murky plotting, because when it comes to the visual presentation of the movie - the usual trademark for a PM Entertainment movie - it is surprisingly sloppy and shoddy. Though a mid-1990s PM Entertainment production, the era where PM made classics like Last Man Standing and The Sweeper, To The Limit looks very cheaply made. The sets look tacky and poorly dressed, and are frequently lit very badly. The photography is also nowhere as good as other PM movies of the period, and I recognized some footage, from speeding police cars to entire action sequences, being recycled from earlier PM movies. To be fair, there are some newly shot action sequences, but to call them incompetent would be a real understatement. We get things like cars flipping in the air - normally a good thing - for unclear reasons, and the camera angles and camera movements always seem to photograph the gunplay and speeding cars in the least visually satisfying manner that you can think of. The icing on the cake is with the editing of these action sequences; sometimes you can't tell what just happened or what exactly is happening right then and there, and you have to make assumptions instead of just sitting back and enjoying the carnage. Sometimes this movie is so unprofessionally made that it makes earlier movies made by PM (when they were known as City Lights) look utterly slick and by Oscar-winning filmmakers. Though I can be forgiving of PM Entertainment shortcomings when they have enough good things to offer as compensation, this particular production crossed my forgiveness limit far too many times.

(Posted July 1, 2026)