Fucking Day: Acapulco H.E.A.T. (Patreon)

Valentine's Day is a time to remember those we love or those we are horny for. I know I personally always celebrate by eating a chocolate shaped box of hearts and watching Acapulco H.E.A.T., the only '90s television show about terrorism-fighting bikini models that had the guts to cast Fabio, a man whose best personality trait is his hair.

I can safely say that I know it better than anyone, better even than the extremely incorrect Wikipedia entry for the show. If you also decide to do an Acapulco H.E.A.T. marathon this Valentine's Day and end up getting sucked into the television and transported into the world of Acapulco H.E.A.T., I'm your only shot at survival. So here's everything you need to know to get by in the sexy, sun drenched, assault rifle coated world of Acapulco H.E.A.T.

Mike Savage is an Ex-CIA agent who has never met a problem he couldn't solve with a gun except for the ones he solved with two guns. He has no discernable talents other than being seemingly unkillable. He's shot multiple times, sentenced to death by the Mexican government, and narrowly avoids so, so many explosions. Near Mike Savage is the safest place to be in Acapulco H.E.A.T. world, unless you are a terrorist or a Nazi scientist, in which case it's the most dangerous.

Mike co-leads a sexy spy team with Ashley Hunter-Coddington, an MI6 agent who is pretty good at chess and sometimes rides horses. No one in this show has much personality because there isn't a lot of time to build characters between all of the explosions and close ups of wet body parts. The most I know about any character is their job and hair color. That's how you can tell the writing is good.

The team is called Acapulco H.E.A.T., which stands for Hemispheric Emergency Action Team which clearly rules. They're supposed to be a global organization vaguely connected to the UN that secretly handles issues outside of government jurisdiction. However, it consists of five Americans, two British people, and one local Mexican Federale who wasn't really invited but discovered them in the pilot, so they kept him around. So, it's a global team if your globe is super tiny and wrong. Or as we call it in America, "right."

Mike and Ashley serve as spy Mommy and Daddy to a group of talented spy teens. They're actually all in their twenties, but the show's premise is how they are idiot spy babies who couldn't function without their spy parents.

Brett is a demolitions expert who's fallen in love with almost every woman he's ever met. Tommy is the mandatory '90s white guy who knows karate. Marco's superpower is that he knows everyone in Mexico. He's dating Krissie, the computer expert, and best character on the show. There's also a cat burglar named Cat working on the team as part of a plea deal to keep her out of prison. The writers don't know what to do with her except have her climb stuff. Every few episodes, they will find an excuse for Cat to scale a wall or rappel down a building even if it makes no sense at all. You can almost hear someone in the writer's room saying, "Cat hasn't done anything in a while," as a large but scaleable wall magically appears.

You might be wondering if I'm forgetting a very important cast member, and of course, I am. It's Arthur! The guys who runs Acapulco Heat Fashions, the H.E.A.T. team's cover business. Is it a bad idea to name your cover business after your covert operation? Apparently not! Next time you're in the Pakistan area, be sure to check out Seal Team Donuts, the best donuts ever to not be a front for anything.

Am I forgetting anyone else? Oh, yes, Mr. Smith, the British guy who gives them to their missions. Oh, also Fabio, who plays Claudio, the owner of the hotel H.E.A.T. works out of, but he's only in the first five episodes of this show. I watched this show so that I could dunk on Fabio, and even though he's credited with sixteen episodes on IMDB, he only appears in the first five. I think Fabio sheds so much hair that SAG regulations require you to keep listing him on the cast until the plumbing can be replaced.

Don't just avoid him because he's played by Fabio. What happened to Claudio is the one mystery the H.E.A.T. team can't solve. It may have something to do with how all ten of the lines Fabio had to deliver across five episodes sound like they've been touched up with ADR. The writers seemed to have liked the idea of Claudio but were unable to cope with the reality of Fabio's acting, voice, or lack of charm.

Characters weirdly keep bringing Claudio up after he disappears in episode five, where he had his first and only significant role-- helping the H.E.A.T team catch a human trafficker. In episode ten, they use Claudio's friendship with a wealthy man to convince him to replace his son with Brett while on vacation to help catch a kidnapper. In episode fourteen, they say Claudio's connections at another hotel helped them get jobs there as part of their cover. In episode eighteen, a full thirteen episodes since we've seen Claudio, Cat asks his assistant what he's been up to lately. It's like the writers thought they were collecting Fabio points every time they mentioned Claudio, but they never wanted to cash in those tokens for an actual Fabio appearance.

My in-universe explanation for what happened to Claudio is that he was cursed. The H.E.A.T team's secret hideout in the back of their swimsuit store is also a Mayan ruin. They bring it up only once, in the pilot, but it looks like they smuggled half the set from Legends Of The Hidden Temple into their main office. Google tells me I may be the first to notice this, or Acapulco H.E.A.T. in general.

Anyway, if horror movies have taught me anything, it's that building stuff on top of Mayan ruins is bad, and Claudio built a luxury resort. That man was super murdered by vengeance ghosts for building a swim-up bar on their graves.

One of the weirdest tropes that will keep you safe in the Acapulco H.E.A.T world is what I have come to call the hat of innocence. It started in the first episode with Ashley. The showrunners didn't want you to see Ashley as too sexy. Cat is a former Playboy model; she's supposed to be the sexy one. Ashley is a smart girl next door type, but still blonde and very attractive, which they worried would be confusing for the audience, so to tone down her sexiness, they kept putting her in these ginormous, hideous hats. The hats were supposed to say, "please don't be horny for me," and they worked!

Over the course of the series, I noticed they used a hat periodically to symbolize innocence. If a woman on the show is good, she gets a hat. When Tommy falls in Love with Marco's little sister, boom: hat of innocence.

When Julie Bowen briefly guest stars as an heiress that Brett is supposed to be guarding and yet they fall in love? Hat of innocence.

When a retired spy had questionable motives halfway through the episode, he put on a sombrero and I instantly knew he was telling the truth. Sombrero of innocence.

When a leather bikini-wearing district attorney named Stacey Harley showed up, no one trusted her. No one but me. Motorcycle helmet of innocence.

It worked every time! Innocent people almost always make it out of the episode alive. Sometimes they're way worse off because they met the H.E.A.T. team, like when the team got stranded on a desert island and blew up an old man's house, or the time they got that brainwashed veteran shot, but hey, can't be brainwashed if you're dead! The point is the hat should keep you relatively safe. Far more safe than the whorishly unhatted anyway.

The overarching theme of Acapulco H.E.A.T. is Friendship is Bad. If Mike or Ashley's old friend shows up, as they usually do about once per episode, it's only to cause as much chaos as possible. While the show was trying to be Baywatch meets Miami Vice, it turned into more of a horny Murder She Wrote. You know how on Murder She Wrote, the main character always visits her niece or nephew, and then a murder happens? With Acapulco H.E.A.T., the action is similarly triggered by running into an old friend who is somehow connected to their current case. Man, I now realize the one thing missing from Murder She Wrote was beach romp montages. Imagine how hot this would be if only Angela Lansbury were in it. Actually, call off that imagination. I am a wizard in Photoshop:

Back to my lifesaving Acapulco H.E.A.T. tips: I don't mean that Mike and Ashley's friends are a little bit bad. Mike's former coworker, who used to crush on him, turns out to be the Eva Braun of the neo-Nazi movement. His best friend from childhood rigs a bunch of horse saddles with explosives in an attempt to blow up a UN security council meeting being held on horseback (as they are).

However, one of Ashley's old boyfriends sold out his government and transformed himself into an international arms dealer named Fernando. Another kidnapped her and sold her into human trafficking for a million dollars, so Ashley doesn't have the best taste in men, making it even weirder that she won't date Mike. He seems like her type!

If you think human trafficking, terrorist horse murder, and nazi fighting seem like pretty heavy topics to thread in between scenes of hot people frolicking in the ocean, you're not wrong. There's a manic joy to Acapulco H.E.A.T that's never been recreated on television. In one episode, a man's wife dies dramatically, and he sticks around Mexico to finish his vacation. Everyone reacts as if this is completely normal.

The above gif is from the episode where four of the spy teens get stranded on a desert island with a Vietnam veteran suffering from severe PTSD. They're essentially being hunted, but they pause to romp on the beach because the romp is mandatory. Even if you're in Columbia trying to infiltrate a drug cartel run by a former KGB agent, you better find a beach, and you better romp on it like your life depends on it because in Acapulco H.E.A.T world, I'm pretty sure it does.

Why is chess always evil in spy shows? There's this idea that if you cross a certain threshold of smart, you're automatically evil. If someone is playing chess in Acapulco H.E.A.T., it means the Heat team's arch-nemesis, assassin Neil Strake, is around. Because why make up a whole new villain when you could do Moriarty from Sherlock again? By the way, I'm only writing about television shows with enormous surreal chess scenes from now on; it's my niche.

Strake is both an assassin and an escape artist so amazing he was once blown up in an alley and then fell into a sewer even though there was no sewer or maintenance hole cover anywhere near him moments before he blew up. Strake says things like, "It's the challenge of knowing a chessboard before it knows you," as if that makes any sense at all, and a man with that kind of confidence should be feared in any universe.

There are many reasons not to go to an Acapulco Heat fashion show. They are always a cover for an operation, so they tend to end in some kind of chase, explosion, or brawl. Somewhere out there, a rival fashion designer has noticed that every time this one brand has a fashion show, an international drug trafficker is brought to justice.

Acapulco Heat fashion also sponsors some pretty strange events, including the chess competition where models move enormous chess pieces so the crowd can follow the game and a teen karate tournament held in Israel. Neither event seems like it would have a high demand for bikinis but no one ever questions it and I refuse to start.

If you’re curious what kind of swimsuits a company designs when their primary function is more to fight terrorist than make swimsuits, this is a still from a fashion show. Good luck to this man who will be swimming around with a wet bowtie on his neck. This is not a swimsuit. This is a Craigslist stripper doing a routine to the James Bond theme. This is a man who was trampled by a horse at his wedding.

Don't take my words for it, though. You can do your own research and figure out how to survive Acapulco H.E.A.T. all on your own. The show is free right now on IMDB TV, but it's a little difficult to find because, for some reason, they're advertising it using updated 2000s style models instead of actors from the show. So, the poster for the actual Acapulco H.E.A.T. looks like a porn parody of Acapulco H.E.A.T..

For most shows, sticking a random, unrelated photograph of the two hottest people you could find on the cover would be a baffling choice. Some might say stupid. A weird, unnecessary lie. However, when I look at that picture I feel the heat, which is all Acapulco H.E.A.T. asks its audience to do.

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