I was a bit excited to see the complete first season of Starhunter really cheap on Amazon. It was down to $12.49 about a month ago. It's back up to $14.49 today. Buying it was a bit annoying too, as it replaces a set I already have. The Canadian/UK/France co-produced science fiction series from 2000 had been partially released by PLATINUM DISC LLC back in 2004. They don't live up to their name that's for sure. They packaged 15 of the 22 episodes in a set with two dvd's and left the others to hang in limbo. Low bit-rate havin' MF's!
The 2007 release by Echo Bridge Entertainment puts all 22 episodes on 4 discs. Better but not great. Five or six discs would have been better but I understand, it's an expense thing, not too many folks are going to rush out to buy a show they never heard of. It gets a good rating, 7.7 on the IMDB but that's only 169 votes and I bet they're fans. Why else would you go looking there. I watched the series when it was in US syndication back in 2002, enjoyed it well enough to kept a tape copy. You never know if these short lived shows are going to show up on dvd any time soon or at all. To get a whole season on dvd I used those tapes to transfer the missing episodes onto DVDR's back in 2005. I'm kind of surprised that it was that long ago. How time flies. I hadn't watched the series since then. I was searching for cheap dvd's of science fiction tv series on Amazon last month and noticed the complete version at a nice price. It went into my cart with Quark and The Ray Bradbury Theater sets and that put me in the free shipping zone. Love it. That's the cover to the current complete first season to the above left. That's not the hero ship in the foreground. Way in the background is the Tulip, a retired Luxury Liner that serves as home for a crew of bounty hunters.
Michael Pare stars as Dante Montana, the scruffy bounty hunter. Tanya Allen is Percy, Montana's annoying teenage niece and Claude Roche is Luc, ex-soldier gal with a secret. The whole show is about secrets. It's 2275 and the Earth has become a nearly uninhabitable shit hole. Humans have spread out amongst the solar system in colonys to try to survive. That's one of the things that I liked about the series. Just humans in the solar system. There have been some fights in the past and though things have settled down it's still rather lawless and wild west. That means lots of work catching criminals or transporting them from one part of space to another. That's where the Tulip comes in. It's a big old ship that Rudolpho bought and rents to Montana. He's also their boss. He's pretty shady but he's learned to live with it.
That's the bridge. Much of the action takes place there. The ship is kind of run down and Percy, as the ship's engineer, has a hard time keeping it going. There's a new client to lock up, or save, each week. Some of them just get shot. Couldn't be helped. There might not be much spaceship on spaceship action each week but there's usually some person to person combat every 10 or fifteen minutes. Sometimes the clients tie into the secret story brewing in the background, sometimes they don't. The Divinity Cluster is a group of newly discovered human genes that may have been planted by some alien intelligence long ago. They could be the next evolutionary step for mankind. Some of those clients have been affected by the DC and they have some weird things happen to them. Montana had a wife and kid at one time but the Raiders came and his wife was killed and their son kidnapped. It's been ten years and he's still searching for his son. The Orchid is a powerful corporation that is up to no good. They keep mucking with Montana and more people die. It's a tough universe.
It's not a great series, not Babylon5 great, but it's mostly pretty entertaining. The special effects are pretty low-budget poor. They get a bit better as the season progresses and they get the job done. The main physical sets are pretty good but some of the one use sets are kind of sucky. The scripts go from good to average and the actors are about the same. It's dirty and gritty and probably more real than a lot of fancy sf series. Things come to a head in the last episode and everyone is thrown off the show except Tanya Allen and the guy who played Rudolpho. It ends with a cliff hanger that has the ship blasted into hyperspace. I'll have to dig out season two, which was retitled Starhunter 2300, and find out what happened to them.
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