Crew
Director/Producer – Howard J. Ford, Screenplay – Tom Boyle, Photography – Rungroj ‘Park’ Rojanchotikul, Music – Anthony Wade & Jack Wade & Matt Wade, Visual Effects Supervisor – Rafael Emidio Vianna. Production Company – REinvent Studios APS/Latitude Films Ltd.
Cast
Louis James (Ajay), Sarah Alexandra Marks (Jasmine), Ella Starbuck (Maya), David Wayman (Ritchie), Joseph Millson (Nick), Tiffany Hannam-Daniels (Female Biker), Lawrence Tickle (Male Biker)
Plot
Two couples Ritchie, who has just sold his successful company, his wife Maya, and Ajay, Ritchie’s friend since university, and his wife Jasmine, have come on vacation to Southeast Asia. Ritchie persuades them to take a kayaking trip up a local river. They hire a guide Nick to take them. As they stop for the night, Nick tells stories of the cannibal tribes rumoured to be in the area who killed his grandfather. Ajay and Maya are having an affair and that night argue about him not leaving Jasmine for her. Ritchie overhears this and in the morning they find he has left in one of the kayaks. They set out to find him and pressure Nick to go up the tributary where the cannibal tribes live. There they are captured by the cannibals who plan to keep them prisoner and eat them.
British director Howard J. Ford has made a modest if largely unrecognised body of films, beginning with the quite good The Dead (2010), a zombie film set in Africa. He and his brother Jonathan co-directed a decent sequel The Dead 2: India (2013). On his own, Howard went on to make the non-genre likes of the thriller Never Let Go (2015), the children’s film Adventure Boyz (2019), The Lockdown Hauntings (2021), The Ledge (2022) about a woman facing killers on a mountainside, the prison escape film Escape (2023), the snuff internet film DarkGame (2024), the monster movie Bone Keeper (2026) and the mountainside thriller Zip Line (2026).
Almost all of Howard J. Ford’s films make a virtue of being shot out of doors in exotic locations – Africa and India in The Dead films, Morocco in Never Let Go, halfway up a mountainside in The Ledge and Zip Line. The sole exception might be The Lockdown Hauntings, which was shot indoors in England during Covid lockdown, which kind of put a damper on Ford being able to travel internationally. For River of Blood, Ford travels to Thailand to shoot (listed as an unspecified Southeast Asian country on the titles).
As the group set off kayaking up the jungle rivers, you immediately get Deliverance (1972) vibes. The prologue scenes with loggers being attacked by natives sets up suggestions of the endangered tribe and deforestation issues not dissimilar to The Emerald Forest (1985). The plot – a group of Westerners wander into uncharted areas of the jungle where cannibal tribes live and are captured, tortured horribly and eaten – was one of the essentials of the Italian cannibal film – one of the most extreme horror genres ever put on screen – with the likes of Deep River Savages (1972), Last Cannibal World (1977), Slave of the Cannibal God/Prisoner of the Cannibal God (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1979), Zombie Holocaust/Dr Butcher M.D. (1980) and Cannibal Ferrox (1981) to name the most notorious. (For a more detailed list see Cannibalism).
However, what is crucially lacking in River of Blood is the grim, horrific sense that these Italian cannibal films, even a weaker copy like Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno (2013), had. There is a barely any amount of blood spilled that goes over the PG-rated line – one scene where a person gets their ankles sliced. Crucially, for a film about cannibalism, there is almost no cannibalism seen anywhere – a head turns up boiled in a pot, and one native tears out and eats raw the heart of his fallen comrade – and that is it. It is like a cannibal film that has been cleaned up for release to public broadcast tv. All tease and no delivery.
River of Blood is also a film where you end up liking none of the characters – Ritchie seems insufferably entitled in his wealth, Ajay seethes with resentment at this, Ajay is having an affair with Maya. The only likeable one is Joseph Millson’s guide Nick who issues sensible warnings about survival and not going up the tributary – only to be the first of the group to be killed off.
Trailer here