Headhunter was one of those movies that was always on the shelf of your local video shop back in the early 90s. It was always there because nobody ever rented it and nobody ever rented it because the biggest cast names it could muster were a couple of second-string TV actors usually a sure sign that a film is going to stink. To me, Kay Lenz is and always will be Nick Nolte's squeeze in Rich Man, Poor Man and Steve Kanaly will always be that ranch-hand who never got to say much in Dallas. Kanaly only has a support role here - the lead male is played by an actor called Wayne Crawford whom I have never heard of but who bears a passing resemblance to an old British footballer called Ian Rush.
The story concerns a visit to Miami by an African demon who goes around chopping people's heads off for reasons that are never particularly made clear. Lenz and Crawford are the cops who are assigned the case. Lenz is seeing a uniformed cop, while Crawford's wife has just dumped him for a woman. You think Lenz and Crawford will get it on before the end credits, but they don't, which is at least original if nothing else. They're not having much luck on the case until a suspect who looks suspiciously like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction introduces himself at one of the crime scenes and puts them wise re. the demon. Going from disbelieving sceptics to devout believers in a couple of scenes for no apparent reason, our two heroes spend the following hour running around in circles wondering what to do
Despite my snipey synopsis, this film isn't really too bad. Or at least it's entertaining enough in its own small, unambitious way, although there is very little consistency in any aspect of it from performances to script to direction, and there is a very real sense that you're watching a neat 40-minute short padded out to 90 minutes as the whole thing grows increasingly repetitive. And director Francis Schaeffer obviously believes that if you repeatedly mention Playboy and show enough signs saying "This is Miami" viewers will eventually be brainwashed into believing the movie wasn't shot in South Africa after all.
There are a couple of neat scenes here that look as if they belong in some other film: Crawford running into a hardware store and buying a chainsaw on his way to do battle with the demon strikes an agreeable note of absurdity, while the demon's hand trailing across a TV screen showing an old black-and-white horror movie is also well done. The ending is quite fun in a campy sort of way that is totally at odds with the tone of the rest of the film, and Kay Lenz makes an agreeable heroine despite some of the poor dialogue she is given. She's a pretty woman, Lenz; small, but with a generous mouth, small chin and wide jaw. She wears pink socks with a blue dress in this one
The story concerns a visit to Miami by an African demon who goes around chopping people's heads off for reasons that are never particularly made clear. Lenz and Crawford are the cops who are assigned the case. Lenz is seeing a uniformed cop, while Crawford's wife has just dumped him for a woman. You think Lenz and Crawford will get it on before the end credits, but they don't, which is at least original if nothing else. They're not having much luck on the case until a suspect who looks suspiciously like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction introduces himself at one of the crime scenes and puts them wise re. the demon. Going from disbelieving sceptics to devout believers in a couple of scenes for no apparent reason, our two heroes spend the following hour running around in circles wondering what to do
Despite my snipey synopsis, this film isn't really too bad. Or at least it's entertaining enough in its own small, unambitious way, although there is very little consistency in any aspect of it from performances to script to direction, and there is a very real sense that you're watching a neat 40-minute short padded out to 90 minutes as the whole thing grows increasingly repetitive. And director Francis Schaeffer obviously believes that if you repeatedly mention Playboy and show enough signs saying "This is Miami" viewers will eventually be brainwashed into believing the movie wasn't shot in South Africa after all.
There are a couple of neat scenes here that look as if they belong in some other film: Crawford running into a hardware store and buying a chainsaw on his way to do battle with the demon strikes an agreeable note of absurdity, while the demon's hand trailing across a TV screen showing an old black-and-white horror movie is also well done. The ending is quite fun in a campy sort of way that is totally at odds with the tone of the rest of the film, and Kay Lenz makes an agreeable heroine despite some of the poor dialogue she is given. She's a pretty woman, Lenz; small, but with a generous mouth, small chin and wide jaw. She wears pink socks with a blue dress in this one