Saturday night's Lifetime "world premiere" was an odd production written, produced and directed by David Olen Ray (though two other people, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, are credited with the "original story" Ray adapted into his script) called "River Raft Nightmare," though listed on IMDb.com under the title "Eyewitness" — apparently this was the working title but it wouldn't given much of an idea of what the film was actually about. It's about Sharon (Brigid Brannagh), 30-something mother of rambunctious teenager Cassie (Leah Bateman), whom she's been raising as a single mom since her husband, Cassie's father, left her eight months before the story begins. Since then Sharon has sold the river-country cabin her ex bought for the family's vacation home, but she's nostalgic enough for old times that she decides to do a river-rafting trip, which is supposed to be a seven-hour day trip — just rowing a rubber raft from one end of the river to the other while the staff of the raft-rental company drives your car to the end of the river so it will be there, waiting for you, when you arrived. At the same time, three convicts — ringleader Frank (the genuinely hot Ivan Sergei), bad-ass Cole (Tim Abell) and boyish Jimmy (Daniel Booko), have recently escaped from the local prison and are hunting down the fourth member of their gang, Jesse (Bob Bragg), who escaped the rap and hid the $500,000 they stole from an armored car. As if that isn't enough to keep the old plot pot boiling, Cassie is also a diabetic who predictably goes into insulin shock during the journey (which she's making under duress anyway; through the whole first part of the movie, about all Leah Bateman gets to do to play her is pout), and there's also a forest fire sweeping the woods around the river that forces the local sheriff, Lee Decker (Perry King), to fly helicopters across the region with speakers broadcasting messages to any people in the area that they need to evacuate.
"River Raft Nightmare" is a movie heavily, shall we say, "borrowed" from previous city-slickers-in-mortal-peril on a wild river movies, including "Deliverance" and the 1994 Curtis Hanson film "The River Wild," which sounded like Hollywood's attempt to take the Great Actress Meryl Streep down a peg by casting her as the heroine of a very ordinary actioner. I've never seen either of the predecessors, but according to one IMDb.com message board contributor, "River Raft Nightmare" is a virtual scene-for-scene remake of "The River Wild," down to one of the baddies tying one of the women to the raft with her shoelaces to make sure she doesn't escape. "River Raft Nightmare" is an O.K. thriller, pretty predictable and lacking any of the kinky rape (or near-rape) scenes we expect — Jimmy rather bashfully looks at Cassie but he seems too shy either to ask her for consensual sex or rape her— obviously Lifetime didn't want to risk an adults-only rating from the TV censors!
