I love this movie so much

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

"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.

Four American silver-spoon fed would-be adventurers travel to Zimbabwe for their vacation with the desire to go river rafting. They hire Stephen Shellen to lead them down the river. Before they embark on their journey, mysterious cads show up and disagree with Shellen while Shellen's sidekick opts to leave the expedition when said cads begin grilling. However, the four sharp Americans can't see this as an alarm so they head down the river with Shellen as their only guide.Shellen is quick to display his short temper as the fun-guy keeps goofing off which perturbs Stephen. Shellen accosts the loser throughout the film but his buddies are too spineless to stand up to their short-tempered guide. Their meek ways finally become understandable when Shellen sneaks off and murders the aforementioned cad and then tosses his severed head toward the four vacationers. This scene is the highlight of the film. The four vacationers then spend the remainder of the film trying to keep the psycho from further carnage, but with the tasty Lisa Aliff around, Shellen's psycho has a morsel that has captured his twitchy eye.STORY: $$ (This film came well before the A-list "River Wild" and essentially has the same plot. But the script here doesn't effectively build any tension since Shellen easily subdues the minor little uprising the vacationers try. Shellen is almost unreasonably one-jump ahead of the foursome).ACTING: $$ (Nothing of real note here. Stephen Shellen (The Stepfather) is okay in the main role as a psycho but he doesn't effectively go "over-the-top" in his crazed role--he's more laughable than convincing at times. John Terlesky (Chopping Mall) plays the lead rafter and Lisa Aliff's boyfriend, but he's just too much the coward to, like his two friends, to pull for. That being said, all you have left to root for is Lisa Aliff (Playroom) as the only dame on the vacation. There is chemistry between her and Shellen at first but when he ogles her bathing in the river, she loses interest. Lisa gives the best performance here but the screenwriters didn't help her any. After she is sexually assaulted by Shellen, her character is essentially a non-entity until the last minute of the film).NUDITY: $$ (Lisa Aliff has a few brief nude scenes but they are of the blink-and-you-missed-it variety. She changes in her tent and bathes in the river, with a shirt on, but there is still plenty of titillation for the skin-crowd. Miss Aliff, a former Miss America contestant, is an extraordinary beauty with the loveliest set of come-hither eyes ever put on a woman).

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.

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.