A group of war veterans led by Cliff Robertson are ambushed while hunting in the Canadian hills and return fire.Suspecting a future retaliation they gather together more army comrades,stock an arsenal of weapons and head back to the hills for a final shoot-out."Shoot" is a Canadian survivalist drama with Cliff Robertson,Henry Silva and Ernest Borgnine.The film can be easily compared to "Deliverance" and "Southern Comfort".I must admit that the first and the final shoot-outs are very intense and violent,unfortunately the middle section of the film is too talky and suitably dull.The message of "Shoot" is pretty clear:an easy access to weaponry can turn peaceful hunting trip into war zone.7 out of 10.

I saw this flick years ago when TV was still cool and they had late night movies on most stations instead of ridiculous talk-shows and infomercials. It was probably only on because it was Canadian, and stations were required to have so much Canadian content and back them Canadian movies were for the most part bad or non-existent. It had all the cursing blanked out but still I was old enough to infer what was said. But I was most impressed with this back then! It took me a lot of years to track down a copy of this on video, and now that I did and watched it again, I still thought that it was awesomely cool (even though I knew what the ending would be). The story is pretty simple. A group of hunters bored because there is nothing left to shoot, meet another group of hunters in the same situation. Then just like that, a firefight erupts leaving one of their group injured and one of the other group dead. From then on, it builds up from 'should they report it' to 'they be after us for revenge' and every level in between. So the hunters get all the guns and gear and able-bodied men they can and go back to the spot the following Saturday in anticipation of the other hunters being there to ambush them. Will they be there or is it just paranoia? I'm not saying but the ending is a surprise.

CIA Counterintelligence Division Chief was anxious to depict for the general public and specific employees of the U.S. Government an event that had actually ocurred on North American sovereign territory. The facts of this incident were that small units of the Soviet Special Forces [Spetznaz] were indeed crossing the U.S./Canada border and conducting special operations near our missile sites in the Dakotas and Montana, and were permanently based in numerous sanctuary sites within Canada. Moreover, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]had repeatedly failed to locate and identify these numerous safe-sites and safe-houses. It was discovered later that Soviet moles within the Canadian Government were responsible for sabotaging ALL of the RCMP counterintelligence and law enforcement efforts for years!The writer "Douglas Fairbairn" was actually a CIA Officer using a cover name, and selected the name because of his fondness for the "Fairbairn" Commando Knives that were part of large collection, and respect for the famous British Police Officer [based in Hong Kong] who had designed the knife during World War II.Unfortunately, security and political concerns caused extensive censoring of the final movie script and within a year of its release it was pulled out of circulation and became extremely difficult to locate and obtain, even to this day!Limited portions of Angleton's files were released under the JFK Act and the CIA Historical Review Act. Numerous attempts [via The Freedom of Information Act/FOIA] to declassify files that refer to both this movie and the activities of Soviet Special Forces inside the United States have been thwarted at every turn. This includes attempts by the Assassinations Records Review Board [1990s] and the House Select Committee on Assassinations [1970s] investigators.GPH

This hard to find drama about two hunting parties that decide to wage war on each other after a party member is killed from a previous encounter, seems at first promising, but after a ponderous snail-paced middle act, patchy characters and a somewhat unbelievable story to begin with, 'Shoot' begins to lose it's credibility with each slow moving scene.Despite a half decent cast of it's day, the likes of Ernest Borgnine and Henry Silva have little to do, the pale script seemingly stretched just a little too thin for the film's running time, in fact the film seems a lot more suited to TV of which director Harvey Hart is more accustomed to. Cliff Robertson admittedly pulls off a hard driven performance as the unhinged Major Rex, however his character's actions do seem a little unbelievable and unintentionally funny at times as do the escalating events that lead the hunting party into more conflict.Though an interesting premise, that could be easily mistaken for a John Woo plot if there ever was one, 'Shoot' suffers the most by it's shallow unlikeable characters and it's slow yet meticulous build up to the final bitter act, which when finally surfacing leaves the viewer feeling undeniably shortchanged.