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A quartet of city slickers - Ed (Jon Voight), Lewis (Burt Reynolds), Drew
(Ronny Cox) & Bobby (Ned Beatty) - want to go canoeing on a backwoods river
only weeks before it is to be blocked up by a giant dam & turned into a
lake.. But already when they arrive they have to realize they have little in
common with the countryfolks & are terribly out of place when trying to go back
to nature - not that that would keep them from trying anyways. Nature
itself doesn't seem to be quite as hospitable as they thought either, but if
they thought they have problems now ... Eventually, the canoe of Ed &
Bobby drifts a bit away from that of the others, & the 2 of them get out
for a rest, when they are atacked by 2 hillbillies, who promptly tie up Ed
& rape Bobby. Then they want to force Ed to give them head, when one of the
hillbillies is killed by an arrow shot by Lewis - an expert archon. The other
hillbillie runs off, but now our quartet has a murder on their hands, &
after some consultation they decide to bury the corpse & hush the hole
thing up, as once the area is flooded it is unlikely the body will ever be
found. But when they at last make their getaway, Drew has a nervous breakdown
& falls off the canoe ... & when the others try to save him, they get
into some fierce rapids that wrecks one of their canoes & leaves Lewis
badly injured ... Drew however cannot be found anywhere. But by now the others
are convinced that Drew was shot by the runawaya hillbillie, & that he's
hiding upon the next rocks, watching them, waiting to make another kill. So Ed
decides to climb up these rocks, to take defending them into his hands, but
once up he's to pumped out to do anything other than to collapse ... just a
good thing no hillbillie is up there waiting them. Hours later, upon waking up,
Ed really sees someone with a gun, feels attacked (though he isn't) & kills
him with Lewis' bow-&-arrow. Of course it was not the
runaway-hillbillie they thought to be behind them, & now they have antoher
murder on their hands ... Going further down the river,t hey find the dead
body of Drew ... who of couse had not been shot at all but was lethally injured
in the rapids. With a definite feeling of unease, & convinced they are
watched every step along the way, they slowly make their way back to
civilisation in their canoe, until reaching the village they had had their cars
parked at unharmed, & for the law, they cook up a bogus story about how
Drew died & Lewis got badly injured ... & despite the sheriff showing
that he doesn't believe them one bit, they get away scot-free. But the
murders are always on their conscience, & might any of the corpses be found
eventually ? Concerning the backwood-terror movies, Deliverance
can be pretty much called a genre-forming film (even though its genre elements
did show up all through movie history, as it is pretty much a cross between
horror & Western). Later prominent films of this subgenre include Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills
have Eyes, to a point also Blair
Witch Project, & any number of forgettable teen-horror flicks like Wrong
Turn. (Truth to be told, a full 8 years prior to this movie, gore-director
Herschell Gordon Lewis did make his version of backwoods terror, 2000 Maniacs, which didn't
have quite the same impact on the genre though, as by & large, Lewis' films
form a genre all of their own). Deliverance itself is
working especially well though because it leaves out most of the shock
elements, most of the menace the protagonists encounter is not even real at all
but in the imagination of these men out of their element, & this eventually
makes them much more dangerous than the situation they are thrown in. However,
director John Boorman does not tell this on an intellectual level but throws in
enough action to entertain his audience without moralizing.
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