YMMV / Deliverance

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• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Drew a basically decent man who gets pushed to the edge by an impossible moral conundrum? Or is he a cowardly and naive fool who is unwilling to support his friends in a situation where the law is useless and their actions are justified? Ed certainly seems to think highly of Drew and we see his kind and friendly nature. On the other hand, he seems to judge Lewis very harshly for his violence against the hillbilly rapists, and arguably puts soothing his own conscience above the safety of his friends.
• Awesome Music: "Dueling Banjos", of course. The song went on to hit #2 on the Billboard chart.
• Badass Decay: Inverted and played straight. Bobby actually becomes the rock after being anally raped, while Ed kills the redneck threatening them, and Lewis, after breaking his leg, instantly turns into a whiny little bitch.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The "Dueling Banjos" scene, which goes on for quite a while and even becomes a bit of a dance number.
• Complete Monster: In both the novels and the film, the hillbillies—"the Mountain Man" and "the Toothless Man"—are a pair of vile, backwoods rapists who serve as the ultimate danger of the story. Indicated to regularly assault and even kill people in the novel, the hillbillies hold Ed and Bobby at gunpoint, tying Ed to a tree and torturing him before forcing him to watch as Bobby is violently raped by the Mountain Man. The Toothless Man then intends to rape Ed, after which the hillbillies plan to kill them both. When the Mountain Man is murdered by Lewis to save his friends, the Toothless Man hunts the group with a shotgun to silence them all, and possibly succeeds in killing Drew in the process.
• Covered Up: "Dueling Banjos" was originally composed and recorded by North Carolina-based Country Music artist Arthur Smith in 1955, under the title "Feudin' Banjos". (Smith is probably best known as the originator of the "Guitar Boogie", which over the years has become to guitarists what "Feudin'/Dueling Banjos" is to banjo players.) The banjo number is now so closely identified with this 1970s film that people are often surprised to learn the tune dates back to the '50s.
• Creepy Awesome: The kid in the "Dueling Banjos" scene. Never have you more wanted to applaud a kid who more looked like he wanted to kill you.
• Ho Yay: At least in the book, Ed takes a number of occasions to admire Lewis Medlock's muscular body, and in great detail.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "You've got a real purdy mouth."
  • "Squeal like a piggy!"
  • "Dueling Banjos" (and banjo music in general) becoming the Leitmotif for Hillbilly Horrors.
  • "Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjos."
• Moral Event Horizon: The two hillbillies cross it with their rape and attempted murder.
• Narm:
  • Ed's rope snapping and him falling while banjo music plays.
  • He also goes rather over the top with his nervous shaking before killing the Toothless Man.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Poor, poor Bobby. For his part, Beatty was a good sport and didn't mind people bringing up the scene or "squeal like a pig" line, even claiming including it was his idea and so he can't really get mad about it.
    Roger: Poor Ned Beatty. He can play Rudy's dad all he wants, but when we look at him, all we see is him getting rammed in the woods.
  • In a meta sense, this applies to Georgia and the Southern US in general.
  • Bluegrass banjo took a hit after this movie, unfortunately closely associated with it until O Brother, Where Art Thou? rejuvenated the popularity of bluegrass and roots music in the public eye. "Dueling Banjos", originally known as "Feudin' Banjos", had been around for around 20 years before it became synonymous with creepy inbred hillbillies because of this film. And still is to this day.
• Older Than They Think: A lot of people credit Carrie (1976) for first using the Jump Scare of the hand of a dead person popping up, but this film used it four years earlier.
• Once Original, Now Common: If you are an exploitation movie buff who chose to watch this film on the basis of its infamous reputation, you may be disappointed. Everything that made it shocking and gut-wrenching was completely outdone by the Slasher Movies of the 80s and everything that followed them in later decades. That even including the infamous rape scene, which was something just unthinkable in the 1972. The ominous legend of the film even reached other media, further making it look quaint. When in the mid-90s Core Design published the fictional biography of Lara Croft, they'd listed Deliverance as her favourite movie, to make her look edgy and fitting the Black Comedy of the bio. Fast-forward to the reboot game, and Lara goes through an ordeal that makes Deliverance look like a picnic in a park.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The banjo playing boy. He's only in the first scene, he isn't relevant to the plot, he doesn't even say anything, but boy does he set the mood for the rest of the movie.
  • Bill McKinney as the first mountain man. He's on screen for about twenty minutes (and the second half of that time, he's a corpse), we never learn anything about him, and he's never named. And he's one of the most chilling villains in the history of cinema.
• Paranoia Fuel: Imagine being out in the middle of the woods, as far from civilization as you could possibly get. Now imagine that someone could be watching your every move, from anywhere in the vast woods and mountains. And he thinks you're sexy. Feel like going camping?
• Retroactive Recognition: A young-ish Ronny Cox plays Drew. This was before he was typecast as villains.
• Signature Scene:
  • If you even mention this film to someone who's seen it, they're instantly gonna think of one scene and one scene only: squeal like a piggy.
  • Anyone who has Angst Aversion to the aforementioned scene will probably cite the "Dueling Banjos" scene as the film's signature moment instead.
• Squick: The rape scene.
• Tough Act to Follow: After the film's incredible success, John Boorman was given free rein to make the movie he always dreamed of making. The result? Zardoz.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Drew’s constant guilt-tripping over Lewis killing a hillbilly doesn’t land quite as well as it should, considering that he was the least involved in the incident and hardly expresses any concern over Bobby’s well-being after the fact. His constant description of the act as "murder" also paints him as something of an unintentional Jerkass, considering he even admits himself that it was "a justifiable homicide if anything is". Yet moments later he begins acting as if Lewis is a cold-blooded murderer.
• Values Dissonance: At least for non-American viewers, and also overlaps with Lost in Translation. The premise of the film relies entirely on very established stererotypes about the American Deep South and its people, a fact that could be hard to understand for foreign audiences, even if they had similar ones in their homelands. For many foreigners, the film can be still understood as a horror film, but not in the same context the American audience can quickly relate.
• Values Resonance: The film's infamous rape scene is ahead of its time in portraying male on male sexual assault as being every bit as horrifying as it would be if Bobby were a woman and portraying Bobby as a victim who is completely deserving of sympathy for his assault rather than mockery or being seen as less of a man.
• Watch It for the Meme: Watch it for the "Dueling Banjos" scene, then watch it for the scene where Ned Beatty is raped by two hillbillies, then ask yourself why you did that.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Some critics interpreted the film as a Vietnam allegory.

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