WHITE WATER SUMMER

title: WHITE WATER SUMMER
year: 1987
cast: Kevin Bacon, Sean Astin, Matt Adler, Charles Siebert
rating: *1/2

Sean Astin is a quiet nerd whose parents allow Kevin Bacon, as a drifter recruiting kids for a "life changing" outdoor trip, to take him... and four other pre-teens... to the mountains. Sounds like a setup to a horror film, and it should have been. Bacon becomes a partial menace and pushes the kids into being real men: surviving rapids, clumsy bridges, thunderstorms and climbing mountains without his aid: yet he's never threatening enough to merit any suspense. But the real problem is the distracting, sporadic narration by a slightly older, longer-haired Sean Astin who, hanging out by a hammock: stares into the camera and tells us what we already know (obviously a post-production decision). So what could have been fun nonsense is just a time-wasting mess.