Deliver Us from Evil

For those of us who grew up in the 70's and remember the ABC "Movie of the week," this flick brings back lots of memories. It features a good cast led by George Kennedy and a relative unknown at the time, Jan-Michael Vincent, as well as several other solid character actors of that time.

The story is fairly simple: A group of backcountry campers come across a skyjacker that just parachuted into their neck of the woods with a boatload of cash. They kill him and then struggle with each other and the elements as their greed starts to take over.

This is a well paced movie and covers quite a lot of ground in only 75 minutes. It's fun to see external frame backpacks and transistor radios. It is one of the few made for TV movies of that era that have been released on DVD. It's definitely worth a look.

Well-acted film that skips flashy for effective. With its character focus, surprisingly good characterization, character development, moral ambiguity, and pacing it feels a lot more like a stage play than a TV movie - in the best ways.

Bradford Dillman and George Kennedy put in great work with Dillman's quiet desperation being particularly poignant.

The mountain setting works well to focus on the isolation of the characters both from the world and from moral decisions then, finally, from each other. The cold weather seems at first to represent the hostility of the world but ends up representing the coldness of the men toward each other.

The writer, Jack Sowards, had previously worked on TV series like Bonanza and this was his first full-length screenplay to be shot. Its good dialog, solid pace, and rich characterization foreshadow the work he did a decade later when he wrote Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Definitely worth a watch if you can find it!