The Savages

Phillip Marshak, for me, is synonymous with one of the all-time porno greats in DRACULA SUCKS, yet he got off to a strong (if very different) start with THE SAVAGES, another queasy hybrid of fornication and genre fare that plays poorly as a sex flick, but like gangbusters as pulp entertainment.

The plot loosely centers around a couple of outlaws, a white guy and a native American, who meet and blow each other in prison before busting out by seducing a guard. Soon, they're rampaging across the countryside on horseback, accosting a covered wagon and having their way with the occupants before, in a nice chance of pace, kidnapping the young groom-to-be.

Meanwhile, back in the town of Cocksville (Marshak's trademark lack of subtlety is already present in abundance), local sheriff Harry Hotspurs vows to catch the desperados. When the covered wagon and its shell-shocked occupants arrive in town, it paves the way for a violent retribution, proving that in the Old West, the peacemakers can be just as savage as the scofflaws.

Filled with its fair share of rape and crackerjack violence, THE SAVAGES often plays more like a Lee Frost / Bob Cresse roughie updated for the hardcore (and lavender) set. In contrast to many contemporaneous porn productions, which keep their sex hidden behind closed doors, THE SAVAGES leaves things out in the open, featuring an extended 3-way gay rape in the middle of an open field, as well as numerous excursions onto the frontier that really open up the film despite its evident meager means. Most impressive are a number of elevated travelling shots during the outlaws' getaway, which make the film actually seem redolent of a real vintage western.

In terms of production value, it's clear that finances were thin, but Marshak smartly stretches his budget and gets a lot onscreen. The costuming is all-around appropriate and convincing, and the location shooting in a real Southern California movie ranch (supposedly the same spot used for the PG-rated hippie horror flick CURSE OF THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN) lends things just the right ambiance. As usual for Marshak, editing and continuity are all over the place. Part of that can be attributed to jumps in the surviving print, but huge chunks of story are also simply dashed over, while others are belabored ad nauseum, and every scene seems like it was hacked together by a bedraggled editor out of a barely cohesive set of outtakes. At his best (DRACULA) this spit-polished quality lends Marshak's films a layer of anarchic irreverence, and the plots are entertaining enough to sustain interest even when narrative cohesion doesn't. At his worst (LUST FLIGHT 2000 and its slice-n-dice progeny), the results are unintelligible garbage. Thankfully, the result here rests far nearer to the former than the latter.

Other highlights include a church-service suck-a-thon inside an Old West chapel, a surprising bit of female-on-male sexual violence, and a truly grim ending, made all the starker by the abrupt conclusion of the surviving print. Like its title suggests, THE SAVAGES is rough-hewn and unpolished, though it's also wild and unpredictable in the best way possible. It may not be elegant, but it's mightily entertaining, and marks an auspicious debut for one of exploitation filmdom's most compellingly enigmatic directors.