Four friends get together to canoe down a river before the whole area is flooded (for a dam I think). Canoeing and White water rafting is a fun and relaxing pasttime. Well not this time. Two of the friends get separated and get out onto land, where one of them is raped by a hillbilly. That hillbilly is shot by Burt Reynolds, and they all carry him away and bury him together. There is much arguing and speculation about what the other hillbillies will do once they find out he's missing.
Since there weren't any cell phones back then, and their cars are waiting for them at the end of the river, they have no choice but to continue on the path they're on. They go over the waterfall and crash down to the bottom. One of them was not wearing his life jacket and drowned. Burt Reynolds (I never learn his character names because he's just Burt Reynolds) breaks his leg or something, so the remaining two have to help him get to safety.
One of them scales the cliff to shoot the hillbilly and is careful about coming down. This is especially exciting since the actor is actually scaling up a real cliff. They finally make it to their cars, where the creepy banjo playing kid is eyeballing them. All the hillbillies in this creepy, but not like mutant creepy. I will give this film a 6/10.
True story - I saw this on a TV movie channel back in the 80s. I knew nothing about it before seeing it except the dueling banjos song. I watched it, liked it quite a bit, and was telling a female co-worker the next day that I had liked it. She asked, "What about the rape scene?" My answer was, "What rape scene?" She explained. Apparently the channel I saw it on had edited that out. To this day I still have never seen the unedited film, but I have no desire to seek it out just for that kind of scene anyway.
ReplyDeleteWow, I guess that would really change the movie.
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