Kevin Bacon Is Bounty Hunting For The Devil In New Horror Series

Kevin Bacon has been plugging away in movies since making his big-screen debut in 1978’s highly problematic comedy classic “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” and has been in so many different kinds of films over the last 47 years that there’s a trivia game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that essentially holds him as the center of the cinema universe. While you can’t make as many movies as Bacon has without appearing in more than a few stinkers, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the man give a poor performance. He’s been believable as heroes, villains, creeps and milquetoasts, and, despite getting cast in numerous Oscar contenders, has never competed for an Academy Award himself. That’s gotta change.

The only bad thing I can say about his most recent project, “The Bondsman,” is that it won’t get him off the Oscar schneid. That’s because it’s a streaming horror series for Amazon Prime Video from the ghouls at Blumhouse. Bacon is no stranger to this genre: He famously got an arrow stuck through his throat in “Friday the 13th,” and starred alongside the late, great Fred Ward in the absolutely perfect “Tremors.” We love to see Bacon get his fright on, and it looks like he’s found a role that suits him to a terrifying T. How does Kevin Bacon: Demon Hunter sound to you?

Judging from the just-released trailer, “The Bondsman” finds Bacon returning to the lunkheaded redneck mode that worked so well for him in “Tremors.” He stars as Hub Halloran (what a name!), a bounty hunter who gets killed while attempting to apprehend a bail jumper and is coughed back up to Earth by the administrators of Hell, who believe his talents as a skip tracer can be put to good use among the living. In short, Hell wants him to track down demons who’ve slipped their restraints and returned to the planet. The good news for Hub is that he’ll have an opportunity to continue living, thus giving him a second chance at being a decent father and husband. The bad news: if he lets so much as one demon get away, he’ll go straight back to the underworld.

This pleasingly simple premise comes courtesy of Grainger David, who’s helmed some acclaimed short films but has largely made his mark as a director of Nike and NFL commercials. We wouldn’t have masters like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, and Adrian Lyne without the advertisement industry, so don’t hold David’s lack of a completed feature film against him. Also, just look at that trailer! It’s a blast punctuated with amusing bits of dialogue like “Did you take our son along for a demon fight yesterday?”

The supporting cast is aces, too. Country music singer and actor Jennifer Nettles plays Bacon’s befuddled wife, Jolene Purdy (“Orange Is the New Black”) co-stars as his underworld liaison, and the great character actor Beth Grant (“The Mindy Project”) is along for the ride as his dispatcher. This feels like it might be something special.

“The Bondsman,” which is an eight-episode limited series, blazes onto Prime Video on April 3, 2025.