Deliverance (DVD)

Having heard nothing about this movie before, you would be forgiven for persistently bypassing it in your search for your next movie fix. Looking at the outer casing in my local video store the other night, it looks nothing short of a dated piece of 'boys own' adventure rubbish. Looking down the cast list we find Bert Reynolds of all people cast in a serious role and the only other actor of any note being John Voight. Couple this with the fact that it is almost 30 years old and you'd be forgiven for sliding it back where it came from and moving on to the latest Hollywood blockbuster releases. You would be forgiven...but you would also be missing out ...

Deliverance tells the cautionary tale of 4 Atlanta suburbanites who take a canoeing trip down the Cahulawassee River before it disappears due to the building of an industrial development. Happy with their comfortable middle class lives in the city, their trip is merely a two day diversion in which they will get back to nature and have some fun. Except the river, and those who live around its banks, have in store for them much more than they bargained for. The film centres around four main characters: Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), a daring adventurer Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), a sensitive family man Bobby Tripp (Ned Beatty), an overweight ...

I watched this film knowing only that it was a film about some men trying to canoe down a river on East Coast America…however, this film brings more into your mind than light-hearted, home entertainment! Set on a river running near to the Appalachian mountains in east USA, the film follows four men; Lewis, Drew, Bobby and Ed, through their attempt at a weekend, exercising their cave-man instinct to work with nature. With the likes of canoeing, fishing, building fires and cooking in mind…as you can predict with a film, something has to go wrong for there to be something for there to be a film about! …”The best laid plans of mice ...