Damned River (1989)

Very best movie i ever watch

Thanks for the memories!

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

"Damned River" is like a mix between "Deliverance" and "Treasure of the Amazon." It has elements of Euor-trash and I happened to like that a lot. It also has some comic relief...which I didn't really like.The main star is pretty convincing in his role, but slips a few times. The part is somewhat poorly written because he has this alter-ego as a rough around the edges 'hunk' and the movie suffers a little for this.Perhaps the most impressive element to be found is the beautiful cinematography on the river and the surrounding African nation of Zimbabwe. This movie would make a nice travelogue of the region. I was impressed to say the least.For fans of trashy 80's action adventure and perhaps jungle/cannibal/euro trash flicks, I think there is some fun to be had here.7 out of 10, kids.

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.

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

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.