Brothers in Arms (George Jay Bloom III, 1988)

A solid entry in the post-Deliverance murderous hillbillies in the woods vs. city boys sub-genre, Brothers in Arms sees a charismatic religious fanatic who left society for the mountains of Wyoming and his four crazed hillbilly "sons" attempt to murder UK rockers Dire Straits. Sorry, I meant local hunting guide Dallas (Charles Grant) and his younger brother, big city banker Joey (Todd Allen), not Dire Straits. (Variations on this dad joke will continue throughout the review, for which I refuse to apologize.) By the way, we find out that Dallas and Joey grew up in Houston. His name is Dallas, and he grew up in Houston. That's like living in Lubbock and naming your kid El Paso. Also, Charles Grant, the actor who plays Dallas, was a regular on the TV show Dallas. You can't make this stuff up. I used the word Dallas so much in this opening paragraph that the word now looks strange to me. Dallas.
Brothers in Arms begins with local hunting guide (and Dallas' best friend and business partner) Cody (Shannon Norfleet) running afoul of the religious fanatic and his creepy sons in the mountains and getting crucified. Cody's disappearance is bad news both professionally and personally for Dallas, who has searched the mountains for him in vain. He invites his estranged brother Joey to Wyoming for a mountain hunting vacation to begin the healing and to bring Joey in as an investor in the business. Dallas also has an ulterior motive. He suspects foul play in Cody's disappearance and wants to go deeper into the mountains than he's ever gone to find the truth, and, if necessary, seek revenge. Dallas, an ultra-macho man in the Rambo vein, doesn't tell Joey, who is much less toxic in his masculinity, this part of the plan. To Joey, this trip is a walk of life. To Dallas, it may be a walk of death.

The brothers start to forget old wounds and bond again when Joey takes a spill down the mountain in the middle of doing his Elvis impression, cutting his knee. While he hangs back at the tent to dress his minor wound, Dallas decides to hunt them up some dinner. When Joey hears some rustling in the woods, he tackles what he thinks is his brother, but turns out to be Stevie (Dedee Pfeiffer, sister of Michelle, though she's probably sick of being referred to that way). Before he can apologize for his blunder, two creepy hillbilly sons begin terrorizing them. They kidnapped Stevie a month ago, but she escaped. The hillbillies attempt to rape both Stevie and Joey and then try to force Joey to rape Stevie (really not into this scene), but Dallas shows up in the nick of time, killing one of the creeps in self-defense. He's blocked by Joey from murdering the other creep in cold blood. That creep gets away, and human hunting season begins.
Patriarch of the mountain weirdos, Father (Jack Starrett, director of such B-movie classics as Cleopatra Jones and Race with the Devil), rounds up his surviving creepy sons (including Mitch Pileggi, regular on The X-Files and Sons of Anarchy, as Caleb) to get revenge on the brothers and get Stevie back so they can continue the family line. Turns out, having an all-male creep camp in the mountains is not a sustainable plan for creating future generations. Father, a former federal agent who left society to live out his weird fundamentalist Christian-revenge murder philosophy in the mountains, considers his cabin Eden and any stranger to these parts an enemy against God (Stevie was kidnapped in town from a parking lot for procreation purposes). In his neck of the woods, you get your religion for nothing and your murder for free. 

Though this movie has a generically Hollywood and specifically 1980s all-things-to-all-people philosophical incoherence (it condemns toxic masculinity while celebrating the lone-wolf badass, it depicts the horror of rape while also dragging out its two near-rape scenes for the creepers in the audience, it's both anti- and pro-violent revenge, and it celebrates rugged self-reliance while acknowledging that people need to work together to make any progress), it's a pretty decent little horror/thriller. The actors are all solid, the pace never drags, the mountain creeps are mountain creepy, the jokes are reasonably funny, a Reaganite/proto-Trumpist blowhard gets some excellent comeuppance, and the suspense is skillfully drawn out. As a Deliverance ripoff, it's a solid B.
Brothers in Arms is George Jay Bloom III's only feature film credit as director, and it's hardly a visual marvel. The film looks like a competent '80s TV movie, but at least you won't be annoyed by someone trying to be arty who has no sensibility for it. Bloom has a small but very eccentric list of showbiz credits. Besides this film, he directed an episode of the short-lived MTV series New Monkees (and was an assistant director on another episode), a straight-to-VHS comedic short film starring Dick Van Patten called Dirty Tennis, a TV special about the Three Stooges hosted by Leslie Nielsen, and a Stranger Things VR video game. He was also the visual effects supervisor on a miniseries about Pope John Paul II.