Charlie’s Angels: Angel Hunt (1979) – Review

When Richard Connell penned “The Most Dangerous Game” back in 1924 I doubt the idea that his short story would become an often-used trope in film and television had ever crossed his mind — especially considering the fact that film was a new medium at the time of publishing and television was decades away — I’m also pretty sure he would never have guessed that one day his work would inspire pin-up models running around a tropical island.

By the third season, Charlie’s Angels was starting to suffer from a diminishing quality of scripts, with Kate Jackson commenting “The scripts are so light it would take a week to get to the floor if you dropped it from the ceiling” which led to the actress departing after that season, being replaced by perfume model Shelley Hack. It was with her hiring that producer Aaron Spelling dictated that the priority for season four was to “bring back the glamour” but Shelly wouldn’t last more than a year and thus a new “Angel Hunt” would begin, leading to Tanya Roberts becoming the last new Angel until the show’s cancellation in the spring of 1988. But today we are discussing a different kind of “Angel Hunt” one where our favourite detective trio find themselves being hunted, not so much for sport but as a part of a revenge plot against Charlie Townsend.

“Charlie, could you call the Mod Squad instead?”

The episode opens with the Angels, Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith), Kris Munroe (Cheryl Ladd) and Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack) spending their day off at the beach, that is until they receive a garbled emergency telephone call from Charlie (John Forsythe) who tells them to immediately head for Diablo Island, located thirty minutes off the coast of Mazatlan, where he and Bosley (David Doyle) will meet them. Needless to say, that wasn’t their boss and the Angels are being led into a trap. They soon discover that they have been duped when their guide Mr. Wilson (Paul Sylvan), who brings them to the island via a small motorboat, abandons them on the seemingly deserted island with only the clothes on their backs. And why are they unarmed? Well, it’s because they stupidly left their luggage and weapons in the boat with good ole Wilson.

“Are we gullible or just stupid? I’d really like to know.”

The penny finally drops when Charlie gets a phone call from big game hunter Malcolm Case (Lloyd Bochner), an old enemy who had recently escaped from prison, whom Charlie had helped send there for murdering his family. Seeking revenge, Case has teamed up with fellow escapee and hunting enthusiast Burdette (L.Q. Jones), as well as the aforementioned Mr. Wilson, and Case threatens to kill one Angel per day unless Charlie and Bosley can find them. Why he doesn’t just tell Charlie where to go in the first place is never explained but I guess psychotic hunters don’t have to have clear thinking. What follows is your standard “Most Dangerous Game” plotline, with the three villains trying to track down the Angels and murder them, but unlike many such adaptations, the viewers of this episode are not treated to much in the way of on-screen thrills.

This man will fail because he’s an overconfident idiot.

Stray Observations:

• Two days after this show aired The Incredible Hulk had its own take on “The Most Dangerous Game” called “The Snare.”
• Lloyd Bochner had already appeared in a Charlie’s Angels episode titled “Angels Belong in Heaven” because television shows love to recycle talented actors.
• L.Q. Jones tops the recycle pile as he previously appeared as different characters in season one’s “Bullseye”, season two’s “Angels in the Backfield” and later in season four’s “An Angel’s Trail.”
• The Angels take a business card as the only proof that Charlie was the man taken to this secluded island, and I have to ask “Are we sure these girls are detectives?”
• Tiffany spends the night up a tree to stay out of the clutches of a tiger, but this would have availed her naught as there was a leopard nearby, a species known for its tree-climbing abilities.
• Kris takes out Wilson with a Tarzan swing but she and Kelly aren’t able to retrieve his rifle because he fell lying across it, and the idea that two grown women can’t roll over a man is just sad.

Is this what female empowerment looked like in the 70s?

This fourth season episode is pretty forgettable, even the “tropical setting” is rather bland and even the stock footage of tigers and leopards fails to spice things up, and the only thing of note that differs this this take on the Most Dangerous Game trope from what we saw in the Incredible Hulk episode is that two out of the three hunters are killed. In the Incredible Hulk episode “The Snare” the villain does die but it is from accidentally stabbing himself, with his own poisoned arrow, while in “Angel Hunt” Malcolm Case is mauled to death by a tiger but Burdette does die at the hands of an Angel when a dead-fall trap drops a tree on him.

“Damn, I need a better class of henchmen.”

Overall, this episode can be considered another step back in the feminist movement, with our three heroines spending more time hugging each than figuring out how to bring down these three asshats. Poor Shelley Hack as the new Angel gets the worst of it as her character not only fails in hand-to-hand combat with Wilson, she is easily knocked unconscious and left for dead, and later she is again found by Wilson and quickly captured, turning her into your standard damsel in distress, right down to being bound and gagged to await rescue. It’s at this point in the series I was wondering if Charlie should start outsourcing his cases to the Scooby Gang.