Truly Dreadful Film

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

"Deliver Us from Evil" definitely stars a number of heavyweights, namely Jan-Michael Vincent and George Kennedy, who portray two men of a group who come across an airplane skyjacker with six hundred thousand dollars while hiking in the mountains.As far as 70's TV movies go, this isn't up there with the best ones, but it's far from being one of the worst ones. The film has a lot of outdoors sequences and it's good to see actors actually roughing it for the camera a bit.My main problem with the film is that it seems to end too early, like there are a few more chapters missing. Someone mentioned "Deliverance," imagine if "Deliverance" ended a half hour early, and that's kind of where this film ends up. As disappointing as that is, this is still a halfway decent 70's TV-movie viewing. Kind of tough to find but it's out there in internet-land.

George Kennedy, Jan-Michael Vincent, Jack Weston, Bradford Dillman, are among the wilderness warriors tempted to divide and keep $600,000 taken from a parachuting plane hijacker. After George Kennedy kills the hijacker, the group rather quickly decides to hike out of the mountains with their windfall gain. This leads to various members dying, with their share again divided equally among the survivors. With the money seeming to bring on nothing but bad luck, the last men find themselves burning $100 bills for warmth in a driving blizzard. The scenery is impressive, character development acceptable, and the story rather predictable. - MERK

It's hard to believe that this film is nearly forty years old, and I would dare to say that it is still thrilling by today's standards, without relying on extremely expensive special effects or gore or of any of the like. I was in the mood to watch something on the order of 'A Simple Plan' with Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, and 'Deliver Us From Evil' was a definite inspiration for that one. Other reviewers have likened this movie to 'Deliverance' but I can't say as I haven't seen it yet. The acting is decent, although I had only ever heard of George Kennedy before.It's hard to believe that this movie was made for TV, and it really is a shame that more people don't know about it, because I would definitely recommend it.DELIVER US FROM EVIL ----- 8/10

This was one of the first made-for-TV movies and it is a good one. A group of hikers hear on a radio about a skyjacker taking over an airplane and collecting a ransom. Soon thereafter they see a parachutist coming down in the mountains near them. When they run across a lone hiker, they chase him and one of the hikers shoots him to death. Sure enough, the lone hiker is the skyjacker and his backpack has $600,000.00 in it.The group debates about what to do and decides to split the money and go home and say nothing. (Sort of a mountain version of "Deliverance"--of which it is certainly derivative--meets "A Simple Plan"). Of course along the way nature starts punishing them for their sins and the hikers face increasingly difficult obstacles which kill them off one by one until, crossing a glacier in a snow storm two of them abandon their packs heavy with money while the greediest stays behind, refusing to give up the money but being forced to try and burn it to keep from freezing to death.George Kennedy, Bradford Dillman, Jack Weston and Jan-Michael Vincent all give good performances in this movie. "A Simple Plan" told a similar story but about 25 years after "Deliver Us From Evil" did but didn't necessarily tell the story any better. It is probably impossible to rent this movie and almost impossible to see it re-run on TV. That's a shame because it is worth watching.