Deliverance (1972)
Hadn't seen it since I was a kid. Hardly Oscar material but I liked it. There was a lot more going on than I remembered. There was also quite a bit of ambiguity. I'd always assumed that their tormentors were the same folk they initially came across. Particularly because of that creepy fuck with the bango (and damn, was he creepy). Most likely it was just random hillbillies. We never really found out what they were up to, other than being dicks. There's no telling if Ronnie Cox was actually shot or not. I kind of assumed he went over the side intentionally, unable to live with what had transpired, but we're just not sure. Because of that, we have no way of knowing if the guy Voight killed at the top of the cliff face was up to no good, or just out hunting. He might have been a decent guy willing to help them. By the time he raised his rifle he was already covered by the bow, though. And after all that had already happened, Voight was absolutely right to treat him as a deadly threat at the time. It's therefore entirely possible that, though no fault of their own, they were not really any better than the hillbillies, save for the two rapists. After all, the first ones they came across actually did deliver their cars, as promised, suggesting they were honorable folk.
There was also an uncomfortable realness to it all. Ronnie Cox's meltdown certainly contributed. Great actor. But more striking were the long, anguished deaths of the two hillbillies. Both of them took an uncomfortably long time to die, with lots of pained expressions and gurgling sounds. In the case of the rapist, when he finally went down he landed perched up against a tree branch, staring at the camera the whole time they discussed what to do with him. Then you've got Burt Renynolds's gruesome leg injury. I don't think I've ever seen a compound, complex leg fracture portrayed so graphically in a film before. And the totally mangled body of Ronnie Cox that they turn up downstream. A far cry from the typical blood and guts of that era simply because it was serious, rather than done for effect.
Something else that occurred to me is that it had a lot in common with 1998's Very Bad Things. It had absolutely none of the comedy of VBT, but in both cases you're watching guys trying to cover up murders, and struggling to do so as it gets tougher and tougher to account for all of the factors. Not to mention crises of conscience that tend to occur among decent people. And in both cases due to decisions and actions that weren't entirely unreasonable given what had come before. In this case they all hung together and it turned out alright, though, tortured souls not withstanding.