Incident at Deception Ridge (1994): A Stalk in the Woods

Dave wanders through the wilderness with a small screen survival thriller well worth hunting down.

“I began as a production assistant at the old Lorimar Studios, and then at Amblin where I mainly did a lot of running around for Frank Marshall. I went there around the time of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Gremlins (1984). It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot, which took me on to being a story analyst at Fox which is where I wrote Jingle All The Way (1996).”

“That wasn’t the first movie that I had produced though; that would be a horrible little Roger Corman film called Sweet Revenge (1987), then a TV movie for cable.”

Thirty years on from Arnold Schwarzenegger haring around Minnesota in pursuit of Turbo Man, screenwriter Randy Kornfield is hot property on the podcast circuit [1], his rep bolstered by a lot of millennials citing Jingle All the Way as ‘the best Christmas film ever made’. It isn’t – but with that, Eight Legged Freaks (2002), and his present day post as a script consultant for Sony (credits include: Superbad (2007), Zombieland (2009), District 9 (2009), and 21 Jump Street (2012)), there’s little interest in the pictures Kornfield penned early doors.

Much like Sopranos scribe David Chase not getting quizzed about Grave of the Vampire (1972) or Brian Helgeland (Legend (2015)) loudly reminiscing about 976-Evil (1988), a screenwriter only makes good copy when you talk about the hits.

Thing is though, the most interesting part of Kornfield’s career was pre-Jingle. Be it in the aforementioned Sweet Revenge, the Pierre David-produced The Secretary (1995), the Showtime movie Bloodknot (1995), or the film we have before us: INCIDENT AT DECEPTION RIDGE.

Shot predominantly in the lush wilds of British Columbia, Kornfield’s script – written in partnership with Ken Hixon (City by the Sea (2002) – introduces us to Ray and Del (Miguel Ferrer and Ian Tracey). The two of them have taken Helen (Linda Purl) hostage, the plan being to extort her husband, Jack (Ed Begley Jr.), for a sizeable chunk of change. Ed mulls the situation over carefully and even preps the dough – but when the time comes to hand it over, he realises that, well, he just doesn’t care for his wife all that much! Hopping on a bus out of town, the two kidnappers – and Helen – give chase, unaware that another man by the name of Jack (Michael O’Keefe) is about to bring a newfound complexity to their harebrained scheme…

“All the couples in the world and we had to choose you?!” sighs a weary Ray. It might be the type of irascible villain Ferrer could play in his sleep, but there’s something about Incident at Deception Ridge that makes both him and the impressive ensemble a genuine delight to watch. Kornfield and Hixon’s writing pushes plausibility to the very limit, but it moves at pace and there’s an element of humour that prevents it from getting bogged down. Think Roger Spottiswoode’s Deadly Pursuit (1988), just with the more explicit violence replaced by more morbid wit.

The location of Deception Ridge itself probably takes inspiration from Deception Pass State Park in Washington, an iconic natural landscape chock-full of swirling waters and dense forests. Not the kind of place you can traverse with an injury – but that’s exactly what happened to O’Keefe. The Roseanne star sprained his ankle ten days into production and had no alternative but to hike on with his limb strapped and taped. At least he got to take a load off with the film’s climactic stunt sequence, which had him hanging from a tram line two-hundred and fifty feet in the air…

Incident at Deception Ridge premiered at 8PM on the USA Network on Thursday 15^th September 1994, in direct competition with the debut of Flashfire (1994) on HBO – the final opus from Elliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou (1965), The Car (1977)).

USA/Canada ● 1994 ● Thriller, TVM ● 94mins

Michael O’Keefe, Ed Begley Jr., Linda Purl, Miguel Ferrer ● Dir. John McPherson ● Wri. Randy Kornfield, Ken Hixon