The Basic Plot in Six Words or Less: Do not taunt Happy Fun Hillbillies.

My Basic Ramblings: Slowly, ever so slowly, I am making my way through my List Of Movies I Feel I Should See If I Want To Consider Myself A Movie Authority. My list is several hundred films long; at some point if I'm particularly ambitious, I'll type it up and post it. (Perhaps, if I ever get ambitious twice in a row, I'll post a list of all the laser discs Chris and I own. Perhaps, if I ever get ambitious three times in a row, I'll learn HTML properly and have this site enter the 20th Century.  But I digress.)

Anyway, this film was one of those hundreds.  So I watched it on April 2nd.

In several previous reviews, I have mentioned a theory of mine - that any movie involving transportation on water will also include a horrible disaster. Titanic, The Poseidon Adventure, the list goes on, and now this movie.  Trips on water are evil, evil harbringers of doom.

My own experience with white water rafting was not as horrifying as Deliverance, but it was a bit unnerving. I was in California with my family, going down the Truckee River. There were about ten of us all together, in two large rafts. About two-thirds of the way down the river, we decided to "hook up" the rafts, using humans as the connectors (meaning we sat with one leg in one raft and the other in the second raft, holding them together).  This was fine until at the very end, one raft went one way, the second raft went the other, and yours truly went plop into the really cold water.  Oops.

So we get four guys from Atlanta who decide to go canoeing in Virginia for the weekend. There's Ed (Jon Voight), Lewis (Burt Reynolds, with no mustache and before Loni), Drew (Ronny Cox, looking vaguely like David Letterman) and Bobby (Ned Beatty). For some unfathomable reason, I always get Ned Beatty and Gene Hackman confused in my mind, so I kept thinking "Poor Lex Luthor, getting raped by a bunch of hillbillies."

"Duelling Banjos" is, of course, the centerpiece of the beginning of the movie, as David Letterman and Weird Looking Probably Inbred Child improvise a jam session. (Why is it called "Duelling Banjos" when Drew is playing a guitar?)  Those first nine notes have become sort of a pop culture landmark in our society - the downfall of tourism in the rural South.

At any rate, things quickly go from fun to really crappy, as our fearless foursome discover just how messed-up things can get amongst the sons of the soil, or whatever PC term you're supposed to use. Ned does his imitation of Babe (which many reviewers call "The Scene" - I don't consider it that), and Jon Voight realizes that he might have been better off wearing a narrower belt. Lewis saves the day by shooting Evil Hillbilly #1 in the back with an arrow (I took archery in high school - it was pretty fun.  I probably wouldn't be able to shoot a deer or a hillbilly without freaking, but I could hit balloons taped to the big targets) and Drew freaks out.

So they bury Evil Hillbilly #1.  They figure they can get away with it because soon the entire river area (including Aintry, the nearby town) will be flooded to make a lake. Do they really do that, flood entire towns and ecosystems and all that to make a lake?  I know they did something like that in the movie In Dreams, which was on my list of movies to consider seeing until I heard it sucked.

If things weren't bad enough, they get worse, as our group thinks that Evil Hillbilly #2 is hunting them down.*  Lewis gets a really ugly looking broken leg (all this gunk sticking out of a rip in his pants) and it's up to Drew to kill Evil Hillbilly #2 with a bow and arrow.  (Drew is a bow and arrow guy, but he's not as good as Lewis.  Lewis shot a frickin' moving fish with a bow and arrow!  How good is that?) And he does and they more or less get away with it but they have to live with it for the rest of their lives; bummer.

I hope Ronny Cox got paid extra for dislocating his arm at the end. That must have hurt.

This movie pretty much totally turned me off to the concept of camping for good.  Every once in a while, I'll see an ad for one o'them Sport Utility Vehicles, the ones with their own area code, and I think "Hm.  Camping must be kinda fun."  Then I remember that camping involves not having electricity and sleeping in a cold tent and possibly getting raped by Evil Hillbillies, and I think "Eh, maybe I'll just stay home."