46/100
An attempt to rip off Deliverance that winds up anticipating The Blair Witch Project—not formally (there’s no self-shot found footage or improv), but in terms of characters being terrorized in the woods by some unknown malicious entity. And for those who complained that bundled twigs weren’t scary, here it’s animal and eventually human heads stuck on pikes whilst the campers sleep. Viva the ’70s (and Canada, maybe)—nobody today would entertain for one second the idea of building a horror narrative around five crusty middle-aged doctors, who spend much of act one talking shop and lobbing medically-specific insults; only Hal Holbrook (the stoic) and Lawrence Dane (the doomsayer) exhibit distinct personalities, with the other three registering along the doofus spectrum, but I still dug the group dynamic early on. Midsection’s as much a survival epic as a horror movie (in keeping with the Deliverance “homage”), more grueling than frightening which was mostly okay by me. Sadly, screenwriter Ian Sutherland decided to specify who’s killing the great docs of Ontario and why, botching that revelation almost beyond belief. It’s unclear to me whether we’re meant to think that the gang coincidentally went fishing in an isolated spot, accessible only by helicopter, that happens to abut the established abode of some homicidally deranged long-ago victim of military medical malpractice, or that this dude somehow determined where some doctors regularly vacation and built a shack there (with his blind brother) to lie in wait. Doesn’t really matter since they’re equally ludicrous. Introducing reality into a scenario like this one rarely works out well, though I admit that it was hard to stay irked about the absurdity while one character frantically strove to cauterize his femoral artery without being overly distracted by the screams of his buddy slowly being burned alive a few yards away.