Deliver Us from Evil

Renny Roker stars as Chris Townes, a volatile young man who drifts from job to job, and even gets in trouble with the law. As aimless as he is, his consciousness does get raised as he meets Mindy (Marie O'Henry), a recreation director at a school. Regularly, Mindy and the students, including a paraplegic named Little Joe (Danny Martin), are terrorized by bullying local drug pushers.

Ultimately, this is a quite sobering treatise on the elements tearing apart the black community from within. Its low budget shows quite readily, and while the filmmaking may lack slickness, the message still comes through loud and clear. The script, by producer-director Horace Jackson, does fall back on speechifying at the end, as Chris addresses the audience directly in an urgent wake-up call. You'll realize that when tragedies strike near the end of the film, things won't be resolved anytime soon. Still, it's hard to deny the satisfaction of seeing one of the antagonists be ostracized by his father.

The actors are similarly impassioned themselves, although with the character of Chris, it's not a quick progression / character arc. Much of the cast is made up of no-names, although veteran actress Juanita Moore (the 1959 version of "Imitation of Life") makes a special appearance, and you might recognize O'Henry from "Three the Hard Way" & "Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde" and Roker from "Melinda" & "Honky Tonk Freeway".

As with many blaxploitation features, one of the joys lies in the music score, performed by "The Enchantment", although it may be just a little TOO omnipresent.

Obviously, this is something of an obscurity within its genre, but blaxploitation fans should find it to be interesting.

Seven out of 10.

This rather peculiar film begins with a young black man by the name of "Chris Towne" (Renny Roker) working as a janitor for an arrogant boss who belittles him at every opportunity. Having finally reached his limit for abuse, Chris demolishes the glass display which had been the focus of boss' attention and for this destruction he is arrested and sent to a mental hospital. After an unknown period of time there, Chris is finally released on probation and gets a menial job at a construction site where he again encounters racist abuse from his new employer. Not wanting to lose his job or have his probation revoked, Chris does his best to tolerate it while seething inside. The scene then shifts to a drug dealer telling his men that he wants complete control of an elementary school playground in order to sell drugs to the children there. The problem is that there is a recreation director by the name of "Mindy" (Marie O'Henry) who protects these children and does her best to keep the predators at bay. To that effect, he orders his thugs to chase her away by any means necessary. What they don't count on, however, is Chris suddenly taking an interest in this situation on behalf of Mindy and the children there. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a well-intentioned effort by the director (Horace Jackson) to highlight the disturbing problem of black-on-black crime and the inability of law enforcement to combat it. Unfortunately, the film itself is limited in this regard due to its low-budget nature, weak script, poor film quality and the lack of continuity between scenes. That said, while I applaud Horace Jackson's effort, I cannot ignore the obvious faults in this film and I have rated it accordingly.