TV MOVIE REVIEW : Solid Performances Spark CBS’ ‘Nightmare at Bitter Creek’

Tonight’s CBS Tuesday movie, “Nightmare at Bitter Creek,” violent and easily forgettable, is still a cut above the usual “ordinary people in mortal danger” shoot-em-up fare, thanks to director Tim Burstall’s avoidance of glamour and solid performances by the film’s leads, Tom Skerritt and Lindsay Wagner.

In the teleplay by Scott Swanton and Greg McCarty, airing 9-11 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8, four women on horseback, their alcoholic mountain guide, his terrific Rin Tin Tin of a dog and all their horses are marked for death when they inadvertently stray into the path of fugitive members of a killer white supremacist group.

Talk about bad luck.

The killers’ inexorable pursuit and the rugged mountain terrain (the film was shot in British Columbia) make escape impossible. The women--Wagner, Constance McCashin, Joanna Cassidy and Janne Mortil--soon realize what Skerritt already knows: it is either kill or be killed.

There isn’t anything new here, but Skerritt does a fine job as a shaky hero in the guise of a disenfranchised cowboy, soaking his pain in a whiskey bottle. Wagner, playing a woman bruised from a recent divorce, is pleasurably cliche-free. The two of them make a believable emotional connection in the middle of all the mayhem.

The primary focus is on Skerritt and Wagner, but McCashin, Cassidy and young Mortil, while less involving, capably do what is demanded of them.

And, it is a particular pleasure to see character actors allowed some substance: J. C. Roberts as the sheriff and Ray Guth as Skerritt’s boss bring their small, standard action-feature roles to life, despite limited screen time.