WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

The ultimate holiday-from-hell thrill flick. Four cityslickers embark on a canoeing trip in the wilds of rural Georgia and fall prey to local inbred hiilbillies. Cue rape, murder and suggested suicide, plus a dazzling bit of banjo-play.

COOL FACTOR:

Takes a simple premise, and crafts something truly spectacular, with finger-gnawing tension, nightmarish terror, and iconic scenes galore!

SCENE:

Duelling banjos! Out-fingered by a hillbilly inbred.

TRIVIA!

•    The film is famous for cutting costs by not insuring the production and having the actors do their own stunts (e.g. Jon Voight climbed the cliff himself). In one scene, Burt Reynolds begged to have a river-canoeing scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than a dummy as it looked fake. After shooting the scene, Reynolds, coughing up river water and nursing a broken coccyx, asked how the scene looked. The director responded that it looked "like a canoe with a dummy in it".

•    John Boorman's gold record for the "Dueling Banjos" hit single [part of the film soundtrack] was later stolen from his house by the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, a scene Boorman recreated in ‘The General’ (1998), his biographical film about Cahill.