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\nOscar Wilde once wrote, and I am paraphrasing, if a man ever has two earth-shattering Rachel Hunter experiences in the one weekend, then he is the luckiest man alive.<\/p>\n
I am that luckiest man.<\/p>\n
It was the weekend before last, when we had the barbarism of the Springboks, Lydia Ko finishing second in a golfing major, and the America’s Cup boat rearing up like a gila-monster and nearly splintering into a thousand pieces (what price the $600 million trickle-down THEN?).<\/p>\n
These things were nothing beside my two earth-shattering Rachel Hunter experiences.<\/p>\n
I should perhaps add at this point I love Rachel Hunter.<\/p>\n
She has been called our Queen, ahead of Kiri Te Kanawa, Suzanne Paul and, until she becomes old enough for monarchy, Lydia Ko.<\/p>\n
And rightly so.<\/p>\n
Rachel is the one who should be whanging swords down on knighted shoulders.<\/p>\n
Plus, she sucked $50 million from notorious tightwad Rod Stewart in their divorce settlement. Nobody else has ever got Rod to pay for a round of drinks.<\/p>\n
Outstanding!<\/p>\n
And yet Rachel is a simple woman, honest and kind, a woman you want to have living next door to whom you would lend your lawn-mower.<\/p>\n
You wouldn’t even ask for it back as she trawled past your kitchen window every Saturday morning doing the lawns, occasionally veering into the fuchsias, giggling and waving as she did so.<\/p>\n
The first Rachel experience came on the Sunday night when she was back in the judge’s chair for the new series of New Zealand’s Got Talent.<\/p>\n
The episode was sort of from Dunedin, but frequent shots of other venues suggest there had been a cockup in the editing suite.<\/p>\n
No matter, Rachel was back, a different, glorious, outfit for every shot.<\/p>\n
She laughed, she cried, she hula-hooped, and she meshed beautifully with the new guy, who was apparently one of J-Lo’s husbands.<\/p>\n
Quality.<\/p>\n
I could spend two hundred pages on the contestants but this is about Rachel, so I will mention only the Chinese chef with braces from Auckland who sang\/shrieked an Iron Maiden song, whipping his head back and forward like long-haired metallers do, only he had short hair.<\/p>\n
He looked more like a monk trying to shake a wasp from his ear.<\/p>\n
But brilliant, even if he was in the wrong show, he was X Factor not Talent.<\/p>\n
But then I saw Piranhaconda, a full-length movie where Rachel top-billed alongside the brilliant character actor Michael Madsen, he who cut off the cop’s ear in Quentin Tarentino’s Reservoir Dogs, considered Tarentino’s finest scene ever, even though he deliberately filched it from his idol Sergio Corbucci’s magnificent genre-beginning Django (1966).<\/p>\n
Piranhaconda is a deliberate B movie, shot last year under the executive eye of B movie godfather Roger Corman, who kick-started the careers of Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper.<\/p>\n
With Corman there, the movie’s mutant monster will only look like the real thing, a B movie mutant monster, huge and long with a scary face coloured Auckland Savings Bank yellow and black, and teeth that would fillet a buffalo.<\/p>\n
Rachel, dressed in sprayed-on black clothing which makes your eyeballs chatter – all the other women wear bikinis, it is very ’60s – is in a gang of kidnappers in Hawaii, the moll girlfriend of the gang leader.<\/p>\n
She says things like ”Move it!” while waving a machine-gun, and, when someone explains they are under threat from an unholy union between a piranha and an anaconda, Rachel says, ”You mean – a piranhaconda!”<\/p>\n
So she’s real smart as well.<\/p>\n
I don’t think I am giving anything away when by revealing the piranhaconda later eats her like she’s a Cheezel, but I will mention the gang leader’s comment after her demise – ”That thing killed the only woman I have ever loved.”<\/p>\n
I think any man worth his salt – and Cheezels have a lot of salt – loves Rachel Hunter.<\/p>\n
I know I do.<\/p>\n
Piranhaconda is not the greatest movie on the IMDB database; in fact it rates at 3.1, where 5.0 is considered pretty dreadful and 4.0 no better than toothpaste-dribble.<\/p>\n
But I recommend this film.<\/p>\n
It is beautifully shot.<\/p>\n
And it has Rachel.