SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Jason Daniel Baker Rugged anti-hero/loose cannon Los Angeles cop Sgt. Rick Hunter (Fred Dryer) didn't get into law enforcement for the meagre paycheck, or the long hours or the instability in his relationships, or the constant threat of death. He got into it because there are some bad guys out there who need to get taken down hard and he is just the bucko ta do it! Hunter's original arrangement with partner Dee Dee McCall (A trigger-happy, Lynda Carter lookalike referred to as "The Brass Cupcake" by her more sexist colleagues) was that they would be partners in name only .Since neither could keep a partner and they both worked better on their own the arrangement appeared to make sense. They would sign each other's reports and vouch for one another conducting investigations separately.But each brought out the best in the other making inroads into crime heightening the danger with their very progress. They would come to need each other's presence up until they acknowledged they really were partners.There was big money in the vigilante cop formula and Hunter which ran for 152 episodes didn't disappoint giving audiences their fix of gritty cop show action. Hunter was essentially "Dirty Harry for TV" and was cast with ex-pro football player Fred Dryer who sort of resembled Clint Eastwood though unlike Eastwood Dryer couldn't act and was balding even more rapidly than Eastwood.Dryer actually appeared to be affecting an impression of Eastwwod with an angry glare and clenched teeth sneering his lines early in the series. Hunter had the same trigger-happy gunslinger attitude as Dirty Harry and the familiar difficulty dealing with a police bureaucracy obsessed with public relations, red tape and prospects for career advancement.Hunter also famously had a habit of physically abusing suspects of African-American, Asian and Latino persuasion. Hunter's partner Dee Dee McCall often came close to being raped and murdered on a show which narrowly avoided being classified as the most violent on network TV simply because Miami Vice and the A-Team (NBC took over from ABC as the network with the most violent programming) were still on the air. Think of all of that what you will.Very little of what was shown in the murder mysteries was all that complicated and the one-dimensional characters never challenged audiences much. The quality of the production actually deteriorated as it went. There was never an examination of light and shade in the characters. There was not the slightest hint of moral subjectivity in the performances. There was merely good destroying evil.The Hunter character was much like those portrayed by John Wayne or Randolph Scott in Westerns; One who exerts brute force in the same way a bullying thug might but is insulated by his own righteousness. It is of little challenge to an actor and as such Dryer was much more effective early in the series when he was not called upon to emote on camera.Reviews of this show at the time it came out were almost uniformly negative. Nobody liked this show...With the exception of the actual public.

MichaelM24 My favorite cop show of the 80s was HUNTER. Fred Dryer was awesome as Rick Hunter, a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later Dirty Harry-type, which is actually what the show started out as, but the character was toned down a little afterwards. Stephanie Kramer, as D.D. McCall, was the best of his three female partners, as was Charles Hallahan as the third of three different captains. It was like a small-screen action movie, with plenty of car chases and gun fights. Dryer and Kramer had great chemistry, which especially came across in the episodes featuring personal stories for the two, such as the first season two-parter in which Hunter defies orders and goes to Mexico to look for a guy who had attacked McCall and hid behind his diplomatic immunity. It was an episode that allowed Hunter to display the depth of his friendship to McCall and showed just how much the characters cared for one another. I don't remember too much about the later years (in which Hunter went through two new partners), but I recall a lot of the earlier ones, with many standout episodes. I would definitely love to have this great series on DVD.

Robert_W 'Hunter' was such a great show - even despite having several cast changes throughout the course of it's 7 year run, the chemistry between characters was inspiring - most definitely the relationship between Hunter and McCall, and the captain between the two themselves (Charles Hallahan was the best captain, in my opinion, of the 3 captains that starred throughout the course of the show)....Direction, writing, acting, and the associated music (have I left anything out?) were the main components that undoubtedly led to the success of the show...If you get a chance to watch 'Hunter,' watch it!

dnwalker The earliest episodes with John Amos as the captain were silly. His continuing bad attitude toward them in the face of their success was unrealistic. Beyond that, however, the entire series was great. It suffered some after Stepfanie Kramer left, but it was still good.