When people say, “You couldn’t pay me to watch that,” they probably weren’t referring to Money Hunt: The Mystery of the Missing Link. All of 45 minutes, the made-for-VHS “original mystery movie” asked viewers to attempt to solve it for a chance to snag a $100,000 booty. One wonders if this tape is to blame for Dino De Laurentiis’ Million Dollar Mystery, a legendary bomb somehow more watchable even at double the running time.
Then halfway through his TV gig on Magnum P.I. as the mustachioed guy women didn’t want to fuck, John Hillerman hosts. He tells viewers they’ll need to decipher the clues to come up with three things: a region, a city and a safety deposit box number. What he doesn’t share until the end is they need to watch again to locate the phone number to call with the solution, which is like telling a patient who just had a root canal that a colonoscopy is needed immediately and, oops, the anesthesia tank is empty.
Cut to the “movie,” featuring Beverly Hills Cop’s John Ashton as chain-smoking private dick Cash Hunt. (Ha?) Amid a biz dry spell in a hot Hollywood summer, Hunt gets a case that leads him to the House of Liver restaurant, not to mention a few kuh-raaazy characters like a sexy waitress with a Judy Landers voice (Zane Buzby, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion), a patently ridiculous fortune teller (Ruth Crawford, 2009’s American Virgin) and a blind airline pilot (Newell Alexander, 1982’s Homework), all of whom want a gander at his office’s energy meter.
Despite a decent approximation of the rhythm of hard-boiled pulp narration, Money Hunt makes no sense. That may be by design to call attention to awkward clues and/or red herrings. Either way, Hunt’s as in the dark as we are, so with no true conclusion, it doesn’t work as a mystery. By comparison, the lamentable VCR game Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder is The Maltese Falcon. (Wait, let’s not go that far. The Maltese Bippy.)
Now, just because the program also plays a self-parody doesn’t mean it works as a comedy; it works against it. Try as Ashton and Buzby might to sell them, the jokes are painful. They might have landed in TV’s Police Squad! (or its eventual Naked Gun movies) — for example, after Hunt says, “I think it’s time we lay all our cards on the table,” the camera fades to … yeah, I knew I needn’t go further — but director David Hemmings (yes, the Blow-Up actor) is neither Zucker nor an Abrahams.
As unappealing as the sweaty wife-beater Ashton wears throughout, Money Hunt features a great deal of hotcha-hotcha-hotcha innuendo, a brief animated dream sequence and end credits that include a list of helpful reference materials, from the Rand McNally atlas to The Dictionary of Calories and Carbohydrates. So who won? You, if you never watch. —Rod Lott
