John Roselius | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Hunter, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1991. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, someone is killing criminals in Los Angeles and, for once, it’s not Rick Hunter!

Episode 1,15 “The Beach Boy”

(Dir by Richard Colla, originally aired on April 6th, 1985)

A Hawaiian drug lord is angered when five Los Angeles drug dealers decide to stop dealing his product. So, he sends his main assassin — Wes “Beach Boy” Kapano (Brett Clark) — to L.A. to kill all five of them. Hunter and McCall find themselves in the strange position of providing productive custody to the dealers while trying to stop Kapano.

This was a typical “chase-em-and-shoot-em” episode of Hunter. Dee Dee even managed to get shot for the second time this season. (And, once again, it didn’t seem to actually hurt her. “I’m fine!”) For the first season, at least, Hunter kept things simple. In between the flirtatious Hunter/McCall banter, there would be at least one car chase and three shootings.

What sets this episode apart is that Hunter and McCall are protecting drug dealers. While McCall makes it clear that she doesn’t actually care what happens to the dealers, Hunter’s feelings are a bit more ambivalent. He’s been chasing the dealers for so long that he’s developed a grudging affection for them. When one of them is killed while helping the police, Hunter’s actually upset about it.

The other thing that sets this episode apart was Brett Clark’s intimidating turn as the assassin. The Beach Boy, as he’s called, doesn’t waste too much time with conversations. He doesn’t brag about how clever he is or go to a lot of trouble trying to fool anyone. Instead, he just shows up and starts firing. He wears a bulletproof vest, as well. McCall shoots him twice and he barely flinches. He’s a scary dude!

That said, Hunter still manages to kill him. How many people have been killed by Rick Hunter so far? I’ve lost track. Most officers are suspended after a shooting so that the shooting board can rule whether or not it was justified. Hunter is always back on the streets within an hour of killing someone. Considering how quick he is with a gun, I probably wouldn’t want to tell him he was suspended either.

Much like Hunter and McCall, this episode was brutal and efficient.

Of all the stars to come out of Twin Peaks, Sherilyn Fenn’s star briefly shined the brightest and sadly, she was the most misused by Hollywood. While it is true that Fenn has worked regularly since Twin Peaks went off the air, she has rarely gotten the great roles that someone with her talent deserves. Instead, her performances have far too often been the best thing about an otherwise mediocre film.

For example, Ruby.

In this very speculative biopic about the strip club owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald and whose organized crime background has put him at the center of a thousand conspiracy theories, Danny Aiello plays Jack Ruby and Sherilyn Fenn plays his only friend, Sheryl Ann Dujean (or, when she’s stripping in the Carousel Club, Candy Cane). The film portrays Jack Ruby as being a low-level mobster who is never as valuable or as important to his superiors as he thinks he is. In this movie, Ruby is always on the outside looking in on the conspiracy and, when he kills Oswald, it is because he wants to prove that he is more than just a small time hood. Candy, who was a composite of several Carousel Club dancers, maintains a strong platonic friendship with Jack and is always there for him to talk to, except for when she goes to Vegas to perform for and sleep with the President.

Ruby came out as the same time as JFK and it often seems like a fanfic based on Stone’s film. Low budget and overwritten, Ruby never works as a movie but Danny Aiello is perfectly cast as the bombastic but insecure Jack Ruby. Unfortunately, Ruby‘s screenplay often does not seem to know what it wants to say about its main character. As Candy, Fenn is not given nearly enough to do but she still manages to show the same natural spark that made her a star on Twin Peaks.

Sherilyn Fenn is not the only Twin Peaks cast member to have a role in Ruby. Keep an eye out for a post-Twin Peaks, pre-X-Files David Duchovny, playing the role of J.D. Tippit.