The Bounty Huntress

Rating

Director

Madison Monroe

Screenplay

Karen Stone

Length

1h 38m

Starring

Mary Shannon, George Thomas, Devinn Lane, Jason Schnuit, Sebastian Guy, Kimber Lynn

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
In The Bounty Huntress, a female bounty hunter (Nicki Dolan) goes in search of a missing mob rat whose seclusion will be her downfall.

J.C. is a bounty hunter with a knack for capturing her prey with seduction and cunning. The opening scenes find J.C. stalking a lascivious gambler into his own stomping grounds. She manages to seduce him into revealing his name, then cuffs him at the table. All of this is preceded by a pointless sex scene between a young prostitute and the prey.

We soon learn that J.C. has a contact in the prosecuting attorney’s office. It’s her ex-husband Gordon (Sebastion Guy) and he has it in for J.C. He wants her to help him track down a mafia rat named Franco (George Thomas) and bring him in so he can testify. To do this, J.C. first approaches her bounty-hunting bookie and he arranges for her to be partnered with an attractive idiot named Lance (Jason Schnuit) who ends up falling for two hookers who have devious plans for him.

The movie plays like an extremely bad soap opera, but unlike daytime serials, The Bounty Huntress has topless women and none of the serialized intrigue. The director shows no evidence of talent here, while the actors do nothing here that would help them get jobs as professional actors. Perhaps that’s how they ended up where they are – working in the soft pornography business where they can briefly capitalize on their eventually fading beauty.

The screenplay, if the Writers Guild of America even acknowledges it as such, is painfully predictable. The conclusion is visible from the moment we discover Franco’s secret and the characters never break away from their two-dimensional page, going so far as to become one-dimensional. You learn nothing about the characters’ real motivations and even if there is a brief glimpse, you can’t decipher it from the barely noticeable plot work.

As with most sex-driven cinema, The Bounty Huntress exhibits every unappealing element of cheap moviemaking. The editing is of home video quality, the cheesy music sounds like it was composed two decades ago for similarly themed movies and there is no sense of visual style, with the costume and art design limited to office buildings and barns, without distinctiveness.

I’m sure there are audiences out there that will find this type of film engaging, but most folks will find it garish, unattractive and repugnant. No one who appreciates serious films is likely to find even a smidgen of creativity in this overblown sex film.

With films like The Bounty Huntress, you find that there is a side of film that is filled with fluff. It’s a side that is neither interesting nor enjoyable, and if it weren’t for the desires of millions of sex-starved men, this type of film would become extinct.

Review Written

December 23, 2002