Manhunters

The most amazing thing about "Manhunters" is that somehow, don't ask me how, it manages to make its stars look like real people. They are still far too hot to be real bounty hunters, but they do actually look like humans instead of perfect sex robots built by the Department of Defense. The look comes in particularly handy for Rachel ([jessica drake]), whose role is that of a woman at the end of her rope, workwise. It is not immediately apparent, but insofar as there is a story to it, "Manhunters" is, ultimately, the tale of Rachel's disillusionment. The rest of it, aside from the sex, is really just character development; each of the four girls gets a little time in the spotlight, so we can see that they're really characters.

Bobbi ([Kirsten Price]) is the baby of the bunch, a tomboy whose dad taught her to be rough and tough; she drinks hard and plays hard, and she doesn't appreciate subtlety. Kris ([Carmen Hart]) is the sweetest and goofiest of the bunch, is a second-generation bounty hunter, and Maria (Exotica) is a barrio-bred tough girl who watched her brothers go in and out of jail and decided to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Together, they are the Manhunters, the toughest bunch of badass bitches ever to work for Randy Spears in a movie about bounty hunters. Actually, they are a pretty tough bunch of bitches, as you can see in the extras -- there are featurettes about their training in fighting, guns, procedure, and technique. To [Brad Armstrong]'s and Wicked's credit, they are all very watchable and even in some cases fascinating.

There is a lot of fucking in this movie, which, all things considered, is a good thing. The movie might well have been interesting, if much shorter, without the sex, but it's still good to have it there, especially since, in a few cases, it actually furthers the plot.

Scene 1 is a throwaway, unrelated to the story except to demonstrate the easy way to capture a suspect (with his pants around his ankles). The second scene is another throwaway, albeit a hot one; the girls are sent to pick up a rapper/thug who's working on his new album in the studio while members of his posse get it on with three groupies (Dragonlily, Naomi Banxxx, and Devon Lee, providing a nice touch of racial diversity -- see if you can guess, from their names, which one is white, which one Asian, and which one black). The rapper is played by Charlie Check'm, who also ably provides credible songs for the opening and closing credits and the menu screens. In scene three, Kris and Rachel head over to a woman's house to collect her thieving ex-boyfriend after she turns him in, and the woman describes in great detail the things of which he is capable in the bedroom; we get to watch her recall it in flashback form.

Four scenes in, we finally get to one of the contract girls. In a voice-over, Rachel explains that the girls like to blow off steam in different ways; for Bobbi, it's working out at the dojo. After a pretty good fight scene, Bobbi and her karate instructor boyfriend get it on on the mats. After Bobbi's gotten her rocks off, the four girls head out to a club to pick up a female drug dealer, and tempers flare as Rachel gets on the other three girls for not taking her orders, and the job, seriously enough, and when that's over, Rachel heads home for an unexpected confrontation with an ex. Kevin (Brad Armstrong) is a former boyfriend who disappeared two years ago and his appearance highlights both the bleakness of Rachel's personal life and her growing disillusionment with her job. She comes across as more vulnerable than she wants to admit, and happy to surrender a little control.

Jack ([Randy Spears] in a non-sex role), the owner of the bail bond company they work for, notices Rachel's anomie and calls her on it, but she denies that anything is wrong. He sends them out to pick up a sleazy biker (the delightfully manic [Brian Surewood]), who they catch in a threesome with a pair of hookers ([Sandra Romain] and [Jada Fire]); he flees out a window when they knock down the door, and in the course of a chase scene over rooftops manages to knock Rachel out with a two-by-four. Fortunately Bobbi, who loves macing guys, is there for backup, and she puts the runner down without much more incident, but the whole scene gives point to Rachel's voiced-over lament that she's losing her focus.

It doesn't help her frame of mind that Kris admits to having a relationship with a rival bounty hunter; in flashback form, she tells about their first encounter, a steamy tryst in a hot shower. Next up is a tricky grab in which Bobbi has to pretend she's a massage therapist in order to get into a white collar criminal's fortress-like estate. After putting [Herschel Savage] in jail where he belongs, the girls move on to another fugitive, this time going down to the local basketball court to get info on his whereabouts. It's the awesomely busty and splendidly muscled Maria's turn to shine, and she schools [Tommy Gunn] in a one-on-one basketball game in front of his friends, with the 411 on their target's location as the prize.

Next up is a surprisingly abrupt four-way all-girl festival featuring all the girls on the team, getting it on with strap-ons and plenty of toys in the bail bond office. As spectacular as it is, though, it's just a dream, Rachel's naptime fantasy as she drowses in the car on the way to picking up the hoopsmen's friend, and the final piece of unsettling evidence she needs to put together how she feels about the rest of the girls. This scene and this one alone in the movie seems shoe-horned in and utterly without reason, but they needed to get some girl-girl going, I guess. Finally, after the girls pick up their suspect, we get to see Maria and Tommy Gunn as they work off their aggressions on each other again, in her bed this time instead of on the ball court.

That's all for the sex, but there's more plot coming; I'm not going to spoil any of it, but let us say that this is not really a happy-ending movie, even if you use the alternate ending available on one of the bonus discs.

The first extras disc has a number of making-of featurettes about the training, equipment and tactics used in the movie, and they're all pretty impressive; it looks like the girls did quite a bit of preparation to make the whole thing look as convincing as it does. There's also a blooper reel, a BTS sex reel, amusic video, and an alternate ending which is honestly better than the one on the main disc. The third disc has more interviews, info about the stars, photo galleries, bonus sex scenes from other movies -- one for each of the four girls on the team - and a trivia game which, when played correctly, unlocks two deleted scenes from the movie, the first with Kaylynn and Herschel Savage and the second with Shannen Kelly (the female drug dealer from the bathroom at the nightclub) and Marcus London.

Wicked keeps trying, and they keep getting better. The edgy plot and non-Hays-code-compliant ending (look it up) bring this to the level of a good made-for-cable softcore movie, while the emphatically hardcore sex keeps it real. The sex itself isn't as sharp as the plot and the characters, being pretty standard for the type of movie, but it's better than most; it's not extreme, but it is good and clear and well-lit. Again, the choice to make the girls look like real people, at least a little, was a good one, and the movie itself rises almost to the level that it's makers want it to. Ambitious and for the most part successfully so, "Manhunters" is good fare.   Collapse.

The most amazing thing about "Manhunters" is that somehow, don't ask me how, it manages to make its stars look like real people. They are still far too hot to be real bounty hunters, but they do actually look like humans instead of perfect sex robots built by the Department of Defense. The look comes in particularly handy for Rachel ([jessica drake]), whose role is that of a woman at the end of her rope, workwise. It is not immediately apparent, but insofar as there is a story to it, "Manhunters" is, ultimately, the tale of Rachel's disillusionment. The rest of it, aside from the sex, is really just character development; each of the four girls gets a little time in the spotlight, so we can see that they're really characters.... Read the Full Review!