Mary Draper Ingles (Sheryl Lee) is a happy and healthy woman living with her family in sixteenth-century Virginia, during the time of the French and Indian War. One day her village is overrun by a group of Shawnee Native Americans. While many people are killed, she, and others from the village, are taken hostage. As their time with the Shawnee progresses, Mary’s captur, Wildcat (Eric Schweig), begins to fall in love with her and further threaten her and her children’s well-being. As Will (Tim Guinee), Mary’s husband, searches for his missing family, Mary must do her best to survive and find a way home.
As a film made for television in the 1990’s, expectations were incredibly low. I believed that the sets would be cheap, any necessary special effects would look antiquated at this point and the actors would lack the ability to convince audiences of anything happening throughout the story. It can often be beneficial to have such low expectations, as films rarely deliver a complete void of entertainment. This, however, met each one of the expectations I had.
While the film relied very little on special effects, the scenes in which death was depicted needed some special effects to sell what was taking place. Guns were being fired and men were being shot both by bullets and arrows, yet, there were little to no visuals to aid in these scenes. Operating on such a low budget did not allow for casting director Lynn Cressel to choose high-profile (or even mildly talented) actors to portray the characters in this film. Lee and Guinee did the best that they could, but their performances fell short and left a lot to be desired. They could not accurately depict the emotion of each scene and made some of the more intense scenes almost laughable. As a whole, the cast did a poor job of depicting deep, meaningful emotion.
As those aspects of the film made it difficult to watch, my belief that the sets would be cheap actually paid off in the end. Considering the fact that the film is meant to take place before the birth of the United States, the simply made structures in the film accurately represented what life would have looked like during that time. This was the film’s only saving grace. Location managers John Michael Riley Jr. and Mike Riley chose locations that allowed audiences to believe some of what was taking place. While the rest of the film made it difficult to watch, the beautifully simplistic sets and filming locations gave audiences something to look at. Director Martin Davidson, was surrounded by an incompetent cast and crew that was unable to deliver in many ways.
The film met each low expectation, and, as it progressed, had viewers begging for it to end.
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