Deliverance (Deliverance (DVD))

Member Name: Macfarlane65

Product:	Deliverance (DVD)
Date:	02/07/09 (24 review reads)
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This is a very gritty film indeed. It tells of the recreational journey by canoe of four men down a river which is shortly to be flooded when a dam is built. Local people - a very odd set of characters, inbred and sinister - find this journey absurd ; the city men are off their heads. Near the beginning of the film there is a remarkable impromptu banjo-and-guitar duet between one of the four and a hillbilly adolescent, a weird-looking guy, which somehow sets the unsettling tone for the whole film. All sorts of disasters happen in the river gorge and it is by great good luck that three of the four survive (one - the guitar player- does not). Some of what happens is, to me, beyond belief - for example, the ascent of a virtually sheer rock face by the Jon Voight character, who then kills a gun-totin' hillbilly with a single arrow shot (he has carried the bow and arrows to the top), accidentally stabs himself with another arrow, ropes the corpse down and uses it as a weight to make his own way down, the rope breaking and hurling them both into the river. There are other aspects of plot and dialogue which did not ring true to me - for example, the stilted conversation when the survivors decide what to do with their dead friend. What is undeniable is that the river rapids scenes are very well done (and a credit to the actors, who seem to do most, if not all, of it without stunt doubles) ; the scenery is beautiful in a menacing way ; and there is a genuine sense of tension at the end when, rescued, the survivors are regarded with suspicion by the locals. So the film has strengths. There is a horrible male rape scene (these hillbillies are not very positively represented in this film, and I can understand another reviewer's concern about what he calls racism). I frankly didn't like it. The incongruities in plot and screenplay were not sufficiently compensated for by the film's strengths. I wouldn't want to see it again.

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