Let me tell you: it can be a right pain in the ass when you hear about a movie on a message board or movie review site and (whether the review is positive or negative) you get so curious that you try to seek out the movie, only to find a) the whole movie's not on YouTube, DailyMotion or anything of that ilk and b) it's available on DVD or VHS and, despite your curiosity, you don't feel like pulling the trigger on ordering it online (issues of cheapness aside, you might end up finding the film just as disappointing as the reviewer did...and you can kiss the money you spent on it goodbye).

This weekend, thanks to the venerable John Kenneth Muir, I heard about a made-for-TV movie called Death Stalk; sort of a precursor to 1994's The River Wild with a bit of Deliverance sprinkled on top, but lesser than either of those. His review argued this point and (from what I was able to scrape together on YouTube) I can certainly see where he was coming from.

Speaking of watching this on YouTube, I tried. The uploader (perhaps as a copyright dodge...or just plain incompetence) didn't put up the whole movie. There are 19 clips of this movie on his account and, I swear to you, at least 7 of them are, if not the same stretch of footage, then certainly excerpted from it. All in all, if I had the time and drive to edit them together, I'd probably end up with about 35-45 minutes of watchable footage...out of a 73 minute movie. How hard would it have been to put the whole thing up?

Still, what I saw of the movie ended up being fairly useful for something I'm planning on writing. Plus, Norman Fell (Mr. Roper from "Three's Company") is one of the bad guys. Don't tell me you're not slightly curious to see Mr. Roper firing a gun.