I have a soft spot for horror movies about pretty, awful (meaning both physically pretty and morally awful) people fighting for their lives in beautiful jungles. River of Blood, could your premise be more me?
Quick Plot: Somewhere in southeast Asia (for some reason, that's as specific as we get), white men are plowing down some trees when much more athletic natives take them down.
It's a river of blood!
Nearby, two attractive couples are enjoying their vacation breakfast at a luxury resort before heading out for a boat -- excuse me, kayak -- excursion with tour guide Nick. Ritchie has just sold his company and is eager to lord it over the bitter Ajay. Ajay is having an affair with Ritchie's wife Jasmine and is eager to keep it quiet so he can hold onto his job working for his wife Maya's father.
Do all attractive person friendships involve so much backstabbing and bitterness? Or is this just a White Lotus effect?
The couples embark down the river under Nick's guidance with strict warnings about the dangers of the nearby cannibal tribes, who not only hunt outsiders, but do so in a slow, terrorizing way to keep their prey alive for training purposes.
You can guess where it goes from here.
Written by Tom Boyle and directed by Howard J. Ford, River of Blood is a tricky sort of film. Much like Ford's The Ledge and The Dead series, it's shot beautifully and seems to have great reverence for just how powerful its setting is on film. As an actual viewing experience, it's quite lovely to look at.
The characters, on the other hand, are pretty darn challenging.
From a performance perspective, everyone is doing their job. But couldn't their blueprint be better?
Louis James's Ajay is one of the most insufferable characters I've seen onscreen in quite a while. Again, the acting is FINE. But why do I have to watch him play THIS PERSON?
I know what you're thinking: so we can root for him to experience a ridiculously elaborate and painful death. Well...
SPOILER ALERT
One of the strange things about River of Blood is the actual pacing of its latter half. We expect our quintet to start shrinking til we keep a final girl or two, but instead, for all the buildup of how this tribe plays with its prey, we get two fairly quick, low tension kills and one dramatic self-sacrifice that doesn't add up when you do the fight math.
There's something slightly admirable about River of Blood ending with an otherwise irredeemable (and always insufferable) character making a selfless decision. But this movie isn't really complex enough to make that hit. I spend 88 minutes hating Ajay and powering through the action knowing that surely, he'd get a violent comeuppance. Instead, he makes a noble decision that has that-Titanic-raft-could-have-held-Jack logic to it and we barely see him suffer. Come on!
High Points
Did I mention that River of Blood looks really, really good?
Low Points
Did I mention that the characters in River of Blood are incredibly unlikable?
Lessons Learned
Karma means that even if you can't find a bowl of rice in the jungle, if you're a horrible person, your cell phone can be dried out just in time to reveal your secrets
Blond hair does incredibly well in humid southeast Asian jungles
Baby pythons are harmless and also rather adorable
Rent/Bury/Buy
I watched most of River of Blood on an elliptical machine at the gym, because few things are more motivating for a workout than a movie where fairly fit people are put to a physical test to not be eaten (my fear of cannibals is merited because I'm fairly certain my foodie appetite means that I would be absolutely delicious). As that kind of watch, this was entertaining. It's also frustrating, especially being now the fourth Ford film I've seen where I've found myself wishing it focused on characters that weren't so stomach turning. Make of that what you will! The movie is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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