RIVER OF BLOOD - Mark Reviews Movies

River of Blood, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 31, 2025

A tribe of cannibals often seems like a secondary concern to the characters in River of Blood. At a certain point while being lost and hunted in a jungle, one imagines some relationship drama might not feel too relevant, but such is not the case for this quartet of characters.

They're a pair of couples who have traveled to, according to some opening text, "Southeast Asia," so as not to offend the native people and possibly put a dent in the tourism of any specific locale. AJ (Louis James) and Maya (Ella Starbuck) are married and apparently in the middle of a rough patch in their relationship, while AJ's best friend since college Ritchie (David Wayman) and his wife Jasmine (Sarah Alexandra Marks) appear to have it all. Ritchie is rich, by the way, which should give one an idea of how much effort screenwriter Tom Boyle put into these characters.

To be fair, it's not as if material such as this requires its protagonists/targets to possess much depth. Making any of them likeable might have been enough, but instead, AJ is envious of his friend's wealth and stares at his buddy's wife in front of his own with a look that's reminiscent of a cartoon character with eyes popping out of their sockets. Ritchie doesn't help matters much, since he comes across as if he's rubbing his financial success in his pal's face by paying for the entirety of this vacation and the kayak trip down a jungle river that gets them all into trouble in the first place.

There be cannibals in part of that jungle, obviously, which is a conceit introduced in the traditional horror-movie opening sequence. That revolves around a logging project that gets too close to the tribe's protected land, leading a group of painted men to kill off or capture workers one at a time.

Nick (Joseph Millson), the one character who knows what he's doing and seems like a nice-enough guy (Take one guess as to what happens to him before the third act), points out that, yes, this tribe does practice cannibalism, but it has been essentially forced upon them out of desperation because of assorted industrial and business practices. Look, turning an indigenous tribe into blood-thirsty, flesh-eating villains for some cheap thrills in a cheap movie is questionable enough. Doing so while being aware of decades or centuries of encroachment and exploitation by the outside world, however, gives the whole affair an air hypocrisy, too.

If we accept the premise as an old and dubious cliché for a horror tale, the characters do at least bring all of this upon themselves by own, dumb deeds. We learn that the tension between AJ and Ritchie is even deeper, because the former has been having an affair with the latter's wife, which makes AJ even pettier and crueler than he first appears.

In the middle of the night while on the river trek, Ritchie discovers the double betrayal (It's not as if the two are being subtle about it, although Ritchie has to look at his friend's phone for no particular reason to figure it out) and heads out in one of the boats on his own. He ends up heading down a path that leads right into the cannibalistic tribe's lands, and the rest of any sort of plot summary basically writes itself.

Well, it should, at least, except that the characters still have all of this melodrama with which to deal. Boyle and director Howard J. Ford are certainly working with material that raises a lot of concerns about how it villainizes indigenous peoples for easy, xenophobic terror, but if it works as a horror tale or thriller, we could wrestle with those problems on their own and in relation to how this story is told.

In a strange way, the filmmakers have mostly avoided those questions and worries by making a movie that, while its jungle locations look quite harrowing and are shot with some skill by cinematographer Rungroj Park Rojanachotikul, isn't particularly scary or thrilling. The characters are mostly too irritating or shallow to really worry about their fates. After they keep focusing on comparatively minor issues in the face of a tribe that wants to kill and eat them slowly, it's as if the movie itself doesn't even buy its own setup, either.

Again, the on-site locations (shot in Thailand) are lush and eerie, so the only cut-rate part of River of Blood is its story. It's really, really cheap on several levels, though.

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