Dead Ahead

I watched this movie back in the late 90s on TV & immediately was hooked. I tried to look everywhere for it but with it being a made-for-TV movie I knew I was going to have great difficulty in finding it. Of course back then we could only record on VHS and that's something I wish I did with this film. I love it! Even just for the filming locations; Canada has such amazing scenery out in the river wild. The story itself is great to follow and the acting is just superb, especially from Stephanie Zimbalist & Sarah Chalke.

I'm grateful that this amazing movie has been uploaded onto YouTube. I can only hope it will get an official DVD release but when? Who knows.... It's a shame because they don't make movies like this no more.

Expert archer Maura Loch (Stephanie Zimbalist) and husband Bryan Loch (Tom Butler) with their kids, Heather (Sarah Chalke) and Doug (Brendan Fletcher), are camping in the Oregon woods. Bryan leaves after a family argument. Four bank robbers escape into the woods when they crash their truck. They walk into the Loch camp site.

This is a TV level action movie. There are some explosions and some gun play and some archering. It is nothing that good. It would be a lot simpler to have a single mom and her kids. Maura would have sent her daughter to get help right away. That's why that Heather needs to be taken captive to raise the stakes. The family needs to be more isolated so that the tension could be raised. This is a lesser B-movie despite a couple of interesting actors.

Remake of a rehash of a remake. Ridiculous, completely predictable, not to mention totally unbelievable yarn dealing with 4 bank robbers who kidnap a young boy in order to locate a point in unknown territory. Of course, the parents, armed only with bows and arrows, go after junior in a heroic, but dumb, effort to recapture the kid. Why they never picked up one of the thugs guns when presented the opportunity is way beyond me. And believe me these criminals were stupider than Moe, Shimp, and Larry. I doubt they could have knocked over a lemonade stand and gotten away....maybe one brain could have been rounded up among the four. All this negative opinionating doesn't mean I didn't like the tale: it was exciting and the scenery was something else. It reminded me of "River Wild", only not nearly as good.

The TV page of the newspaper described this as " Action drama . When a gang of bank robbers take a boy hostage his mother armed with a bow and arrow is determined to stop them "

Wow I thought I was going to be watching a TVM unlike I`d never seen before with Rambolina turning lowlife scumbags into human pin cushions . Unfortunately DEAD AHEAD ( Sounds very like a maritime type title doesn`t it ? ) is basically like every other TVM you`ve seen with tedious sequences of Mom lecuturing her kids on work ethic .

This might have been improved if it was one of those cheap to video films because much of the unrealism stems from the bad guys saying things like " Shut the hell up " and " What the heck are doing ? Playing with your zip ? ". As much as I disliked it CROCODILE 2 DEATH SWAMP at least had the gang of bank robbers swearing and that`s always going to be the problem with this type of film - Children are abducted , people die but everyone minds their language