Shoot (1976)

Director: Harvey Hart

Starring: Cliff Robertson, Ernest Borgnine, Henry Silva, James Blendick, Larry Reynolds, Leslie Carlson, Kate Reid, Helen Shaver, Gloria Carlin, Alan McRae, Ed McNamara

More info: IMDb

Tagline: A thriller that begins where 'Deliverance' left off.

Plot: When boredom, pride and a mad second of misjudgement leaves a hunter shot dead by one of five combat veterans also hunting in the Canadian hills, it is expected a police investigation will follow, but when the veterans discover the incident has not been reported, the leader of the team, Major Rex (Cliff Robertson) suspects the other party maybe plotting revenge. Convinced that he, his party, and their families will be targets themselves he decides to beat his suspected assailants at their own game, grouping together more army comrades and stocking up an arsenal of weapons for the forthcoming battle.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Nah.

The first act has the boys in the woods and shit gets ugly.  I thought this was going to be a DELIVERANCE () type of clone.  Hell, I was hoping for it, but it's not.  The next act focuses on what they're going to do about it.  After one of their men is shot in the woods (the bullet grazed the guy) they get into a firefight and end up killing one of the others.  They split back to their town and play the waiting game to see what the other cats are going to do.  Rex (Robertson) does some checking into things and figures they mystery men are going to wait and try to kill them out of revenge when they return to their hunting site.  So Rex gets his ex-war buddies and the vets at the American Legion post to suit up for war.  When that happened I thought it was getting ridiculous and they started to lose me. 

SPOILERS

Then they go 'hunting' in the snowy woods, looking like something out of the European theater of WWII.  They're still losing me because this is retarded.  Who's going to go to this extreme?  Rex must be unstable, wanting to go back to war in an effort to kill the other men before they kill them.  I'm just shocked that Rex got all these other cats to load up with machine guns, assault rifles, etc and join him.  What I didn't know was that after several minutes of creeping around the woods, the other guys have been lying undercover across the river and suddenly their little army exposed themselves and machine gunned down every last man, leaving Rex alive but severely wounded.  FUCK ME, that was cool! 

I had to stop thinking and let that play out.  If I started thinking about the aftermath and how are these people going to explain this to the cops, my head would explode.  The film makers are asking an awful lot of my suspension of disbelief.  That's OK.  I had a pretty good time with it.

END OF SPOILERS...YARRRRRR!

The performances are fine.  Robertson's such a cool badass. Doug Riley's score wasn't. The story asks a lot of your intelligence when it comes to how Rex ultimately handles the situation but the outcome is fucking off the charts insanely cool and unexpected.  It's worth checking out, even if it's the shitty fullscreen VHS tape which is the only way to view it.