Credit due: Tara Reid’s amazing work ethic is a talent we can all admire

She’s faced a lifetime’s worth of zombies, ridden a Party Bus to Hell and befriended a talking hedgehog called Andy. If anyone deserves to succeed as an MI6 agent ‘with a difference’, it’s her

I’m going to let you into a little secret here. Whenever I’m feeling blue, one thing that will cheer me up without fail is looking at Tara Reid’s IMDb page. Not necessarily for the films that she’s made, but for the films that she’s about to make.

Like Eric Roberts before her, Reid’s IMDb page contains a long, long list of movies in pre-production. And while Roberts might have her purely on numbers (he currently has some 70 films that are either filming or in pre- or post-production), Reid arguably has him on choices. She has a comparably piffling 18 titles in pre-production, almost all of them seem precision-designed to stretch the limits of plausibility to their very limits.

There isn’t room to go through a blow-by-blow of Reid’s upcoming work, but the ones I’m most looking forward to seeing are Bloodthirst (where she plays a vampire queen), Mayday 2 (where she plays an air marshal on a flight that becomes overrun with zombies), Aquatic Siege (“In the future, laws skyrocket. Without room, the government deports convicts into the ocean”), and Air Force Z (where there are also zombies, and also Tara Reid is the president). There is also a film called Ghostkiller, which has a plot far too convoluted to get into now, but needless to say the lead character is called Kyle Ghostkiller.

However, the newest addition to Reid’s slate of forthcoming films is arguably the best. As revealed by Variety, Tara Reid has just signed on to play a British MI6 agent in a film called Cold Sun.

Billed as “Cagney and Lacey with a difference”, Cold Sun will see Reid playing an inexperienced spy called Marsha Ravencourt, who teams up with an equally inexperienced Interpol agent to take down an international gang of murderous criminals. It’s obviously too early to say who this gang of murderous criminals will be, but the cast does include Vicki Michelle from ’Allo ’Allo and three different former EastEnders actors, one of whom is Shaun Williamson. Call it wishful thinking if you like, but this does make it sound as if Cold Sun will contain a scene where Tara Reid will fistfight Barry from EastEnders, and if that isn’t going to get bums on seats then I don’t know what will.

And, while Cold Sun does have the potential to be utterly preposterous, I do genuinely hope it succeeds. Tara Reid will never be an A-list star, but you cannot for a moment question her work ethic. Her movies might not be classics, but the woman is knuckling down and making a living. Will I ever watch Baby Bulldog, the film she made in 2020 with Dean Cain? No. Will I ever watch Party Bus to Hell, the 2017 horror film about a coach that becomes overrun with satanic worshippers? No. Will I ever watch Andy the Talking Hedgehog, where she plays a fairy that befriends a talking hedgehog? Actually, I might, because I need to know that it really exists.

The point is, Tara Reid isn’t afraid to do the work. And while she might currently find herself caught in a spiral of endless zero-budget zombie films and things that contain characters called Kyle Ghostkiller, it will only take one movie to break her out. And, who knows, that movie may well be Cold Sun. Especially if she gets to punch Barry from EastEnders in the face in it.

Contributor

Stuart Heritage

The GuardianTramp

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