Damned River

It's your typical vacation-goes-really-bad movie with the guide going wacko, and the resulting helplessness of the couch potatoes in the hands of a brutal alpha type.

Lisa Aliff is gorgeous, and all the actors are good, especially the psycho. What's bad is the writing, and the implausability of much of the action. Three's one scene where the psycho chases down one of the gang who has run off at dawn trying to climb out of the river valley. Meanwhile, the other three hostages escape in the raft and try to take it down river. They get turned over in a rapids (this scene is beautifully intercut with the psycho chasing the one hostage down). Then incredibly, the raft ends up in the same area that the psycho has chased the other hostage down. HUH? When I first saw it, I thought they were introducing new characters into the movie, until I saw that it was the same people. Crawling up a river valley does not put you in the same place as a raft that has gone at least a few miles downstream.

It's this kind of inattention to script or continuity that destroys what could've been a decent movie. The action is also the cheesy, slo-mo type of this era, with opponents standing in ways asking to be shot and squibs exploding, and bodies contorting so much it just looks ridiculous.

The cinematography is fantastic, unusually great of the rapids and the falls, benefitting from its location in Zimbabwe, a place you wouldn't go to now. Anyway, fault the producer and the writers.

My review was written in April 1990 after watching the movie on CBS/Fox video cassette.

This United Artists pickup, originally lensed two years ago with moniker "Devil's Odds", tries to be a coed "Deliverance" without much success. Pic had minimal theatrical exposure last fall and is now in video stores courtesy of UA's output deal with CBS/Fox.

Four Americans are in Zimbabwe for a white water adventure vacation, with rugged former soldier Stephen Shellen as their guide. After some nicely lensed footage of rafting in treacherous waters, the film disintegrates into a corny battle for survival against Shellen. Climax is set at a dangerous rapids called "Devil's Odds".

A rape scene involving lovely herine Lisa Aliff is gratuitously graphic. Her presence on the expedition is unconvingily explained as a substitute for a guy who had to bow out.

Cast is okay: youngsters' camaraderie carries the pic, which would have benefited from more rafting action scenes. Helmer Michael Schroede, a Paul Bartel protege who previously directed "Mortuary Academy", doesn't come up with a consistent tone.

This movie was better than I thought it'd be, as judging by it's cover, and B grade status. We have a sort of Deliverance and River Wild geld together. Instead of going for the gore, this goes for suspense, but some idiotic choices and moments sort of kill it, in part. Hunky Shellen indeed plays a good Mitch Hedlberg looking psycho, who hottie Aliff can't keep her eyes off, until he goes nutty and the attraction quickly sours. Shellen plays a rafting tour guide, who has may'be led one too many tours, throwing his anger on competing African tour parties, who are actually the law. They know who this guy is, and set wary eyes on him. There are great shots of white water rafting, a little occasional violence, including a beheading, and like his new rivals, we too so much want him to die. This film showed promise, and sexy Aliff is really good to look at, but DR is a B grade Deliverance, that really doesn't have enough plotting, and gives way to the obvious. There were some real stupid moments in this film, but there was some real suspenseful ones. Terlesky's demise was affectingly sad. The film just didn't have enough ingredient, but a truly memorably haunting closing credit, music score.

Stephen Shellen plays an African river guide with a serious screw loose who takes three young men and a woman on a white water boating experience down the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe. What his new boat-mates think is just Shellen's bad temper becomes their undoing when he loses his mind and takes them all on the ride of their lives. This little mediocrity does have the advantage of being shot all on-location in Zimbabwe, but as a story it's mostly a rehash of 'Deliverance', with the main variation of having the Burt Reynolds character from that classic film become the bad guy as he does here. There are no hillbillies, but there is a clueless chubby guy (a la Ned Beatty) as one of the riders (and he gets razzed continuously by Shellen over both issues, but strangely the guy's cluelessness was explained early on to Shellen (the poor guy is an admitted amateur at this water rapids stuff) and the actor cast is hardly chubby (in fact you'd need a pinch test to find much fat on him). This is called bad writing and miscasting. But the acting is bad all around and the storyline has far too many scenes of Shellen losing track of, or getting attacked by, his charges and overcoming both problems with the greatest of ease. Flat music score doesn't help.

No one is ever going to mistake "Damned River" for "Deliverance", but it would be a mistake to dismiss "Damned River" as non-entertainment. Filmed on location, this Zimbabwe rafting adventure has photography that is simply outstanding. The Zambezi River raft sequences are terrific. The acting is less than marginal, but that is no surprise. Character development is not great either, but in this type of low budget flick, you rarely get a fully developed script. What you do get is four against one, but of course the one has the guns. The story pretty much plays out in a linear fashion, with the crazed 'River Rat Ray", dishing out the orders and brutality, until the tables are finally turned. - MERK