1928: bailiffs serve an eviction notice on the occupants of a farmhouse, who refuse to go without a fight. A gunfight with the police ensues, and the occupants are cut down in a hail of bullets.
1942: married couple Ben and Ruth move into the old farmhouse, but someone doesn't want them there. While Ben is at work, Ruth is terrorised by a hulking maniac with a big knife.
As soon as The Evictors introduced its wheelchair bound character, neighbour Olie Gibson (Sue Ane Langdon), I knew where the story was heading; after all, they'd shown us a woman being shot in the leg in the bullet-riddled opening credits sequence, and Olie's hair-in-a-bun is patently a wig. It's not too hard to put two and two together.
This predictability, plus a languorous approach by director Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek), makes for a dull experience, despite solid performances from the lovely Jessica Harper as wife-in-peril Ruth Watkins, Michael Parks as her husband, and Vic Morrow as realtor Jake Rudd.
Pierce mounts one or two moments of workmanlike suspense, and offs a couple of characters that one might reasonably expect to survive till the end, but botches many other scenes: the sepia-toned flashbacks are horribly tacky, the murders are lame (only the axing of a pedlar delivers any gore), and the final scene is utterly ridiculous.
1942: married couple Ben and Ruth move into the old farmhouse, but someone doesn't want them there. While Ben is at work, Ruth is terrorised by a hulking maniac with a big knife.
As soon as The Evictors introduced its wheelchair bound character, neighbour Olie Gibson (Sue Ane Langdon), I knew where the story was heading; after all, they'd shown us a woman being shot in the leg in the bullet-riddled opening credits sequence, and Olie's hair-in-a-bun is patently a wig. It's not too hard to put two and two together.
This predictability, plus a languorous approach by director Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek), makes for a dull experience, despite solid performances from the lovely Jessica Harper as wife-in-peril Ruth Watkins, Michael Parks as her husband, and Vic Morrow as realtor Jake Rudd.
Pierce mounts one or two moments of workmanlike suspense, and offs a couple of characters that one might reasonably expect to survive till the end, but botches many other scenes: the sepia-toned flashbacks are horribly tacky, the murders are lame (only the axing of a pedlar delivers any gore), and the final scene is utterly ridiculous.