The mainstream bone-chiller of 1972, though the most nervous people in the audience had to be manufacturers of camping equipment and canoes. Who wants to go out in the woods after this? If a young and hyper-masculine Burt Reynolds, built like a DC Comics superhero, couldn’t emerge unscarred from a simple weekend warrior getaway at a lonesome Georgia river, most of us don’t stand a chance if the hillbillies attack.
No one else in the main cast is prepared for this kind of danger, either. They’re all regular guys, not a competent action hero among them. No one does anything clever. They react to sudden, inexplicable violence with the white hot fear of any normal person. In their desperation to get away, they become a danger to themselves, which is where the film finds its rawest suspense.
This is one of those remarkable thrillers that’s less violent than you think it is after one viewing. It even plays like a comedy in the beginning. Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox and Jon Voight are on the way to the river, zinging each other with light insults like guys often do. There’s a subtle malevolence at first (we hear them mostly in voiceover, the camera keeping its distance, observing their vehicles from the outside, not entering to join the party), but no horror movie music or cheap shocks. The story turns on only a few minutes of brutality. In real life, that’s all you need.
It’s so well-made that we forgive that it’s also an Englishman’s take on the American deep south (though adapted from a novel by bonafide southerner James Dickey). Just about EVERY side character is a threatening or malformed hick with about fifteen teeth total among them. John Boorman’s Oscar-nominated vision of rural southerners isn’t far off from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s cheap, B-movie, drive-in depiction from Two Thousand Maniacs. Not that I mind. Probably no one else down here in the sweaty states minds, either. We southerners are the sweetest people once you get to know us—and after we’ve questioned you at gunpoint to make sure that we like you.