Savage Weekend

Low budget "slasher" film of a very odd, sometimes interesting nature about a group of people going to upstate New York for the weekend only to find death. It seems that the man who owns the property there is building/restoring a boat - which otherwise does not figure prominently into the story. While some of the scenes are very tense and horrific, the film also has oodles of gratuitous nudity, a homosexual man flaunting it and sticking sharp objects into himself for no apparent reasons, and some really strange locals that make upstate New York look like Hillbilly land. The cast is made up of unknowns, but most of them are adequate in their limited roles. There is a bizarre sexual current throughout the film. The first "real" death doesn't come for almost an hour, so this isn't that fast-paced in any way. Yet, despite its inadequacies, Savage Weekend is not your average, run-of-the-mill slasher film. There are, as previously mentioned, some very shockingly filmed scenes. The basement scene with the saw being one EXCEPT for the resolution of that scene. The film has a hanging, a duel with a machete and a chainsaw, an impaling, and one individual is needled in the most extreme manner. What was that whole scene with the hook about?

"Makes 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' look like kids stuff", the back of the VHS box boldly proclaims. It can dream. "Savage Weekend", made in 1976 as "The Killer Behind the Mask" but not securing a release until '79, is completely lacking in a lot of things - competent editing and storytelling being the major things - but it is one mad film and is very enjoyable. Also, it predates "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th", making it a serious contender for being the granddaddy of the slasher sub-genre, thus demanding of attention. There is quite a lot of good beneath the madness and rough edges here. Inspired by Giallo and working in elements of the splatter sub-genre - I can only presume that writer/director David Paulsen had seen the infamous and genre flag-carrier "Blood Feast" - Paulsen aimed for something original and frightening with his meagre budget, and although it is far from a graceful or even coherent picture at times, Paulsen did just enough here to get his name in the books.

We are introduced to the motliest of motley crews. Marie is recently separated from her husband. She leaves her kid with him for the weekend as she sets off into the countryside with her new lover, who is taking her and her sister with the man she is currently seeing, and a gay best friend, out to his cabin for the weekend as he inspects the progress being made on the reconstruction of a boat he has bought. It's being done by a local lunatic of a redneck, who may or may not want to kill them all when they get down there. David Gale of talking-head "Re-Animator" fame plays another hostile local in a very early leading role. I confess that I didn't even recognise him!

So what happens? A lot or very little depending on your view. There's a lot of messing about but the characters are so fun and interesting that this is the strongest point of the film. Christopher Allport as the gay man Nicky is brilliant. And I have to say that his character was really ahead of it's time. A flamboyant, but strong, homosexual man, who easily dispatches two braindead rednecks who give him hassle in a bar. I don't think too many filmmakers were doing such portrayals in the early 70s. The other actors provide surprisingly good performances, also. I loved Jim Doerr's acting in the scenes where he finds the victims of the mysterious killer - "Marie! ... Oh My God!" From one scene to another, it's surprisingly very natural and realistic! Usually you have actors going over-the-top but something about Doerr in these scenes stood out to me from the thousands of other horror films I've seen. "Savage Weekend" is of serious cult status and I actually found it difficult to rate. On one hand it is absolutely terrible. The editing is very bad at times - especially at the end with the saw scene. The music and sound effects are horrendous. But the performances, the grainy, trashy 1970s colour and look - the only similarity that this has with the great "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", I might add, despite the marketing's bold claims - along with the sheer undeniable originality that this had at the time in terms of a killer stalker a group of people and dispatching them one by one - junior films of a similar vintage such as "Halloween" would do it better, but anyway - make this something of an ugly gem. I feel compelled to watch it again. Maybe it will become a Halloween season favourite of mine? Maybe it will earn a higher rating from me in the future? "Savage Weekend" definitely sails in 'so bad it's good' waters, but it sails stronger than others.

There is just something compelling about this little known slasher/mystery, produced in the late 70's. The acting is solid, the characters seem realistic, and even though not much happens in the first 40 or so minutes, the trashy sex scenes and slow character development keep you hooked, until the murders start. The murders are seriously not the most memorable, (except for maybe the needle in the head) but Savage Weekend keeps the viewer watching, with a lurid story filled with sex and climaxing with violent murders. The revealing of the killer is not exactly shocking, if you pay attention either. Consider it a slasher with some melodrama.

It's hard to call Savage Weekend a true slasher, because it was made before the big slasher glut of the early 80's, so it plays by its own bizarre rules and takes a left when you expect it to take a right. This can work at times, but its pacing is too snail-like and its characterizations are too one dimensional to stand out from the pack and make a name for itself.

There's a decently well developed and likable gay male character which is still rare these days, so Savage Weekend gets props for that, but things don't really heat up until the last 20 minutes and, by that point, the audience has been mostly bored to tears by almost inaudible dialogue about marriage, love, and sex. There's a germ of a great idea here. A mature, adult filled slasher film dealing with real adult problems sounds great on paper, but the writing never rises to the occasion.

There's an entertaining (and random) scene with a female character dressing up and doing a striptease for the gay male character that comes out of nowhere and is at least good for a few laughs and jolts us back to life in time for the finale.

A group of well-to-do New Yorkers go on a weekend trip into the country and get picked off by a mask-wielding psycho.

There's a lot of plot exposition setting up one character in particular as the killer, so it's not much of a surprise that this person ends up not being the killer, and it's also not much of a surprise when we find out who the killer is, despite the moment being treated like a big reveal. The killings are far too tame to appease gore hounds, but there's plenty of nudity for those looking for it. The film's pretty entertaining, actually, the kind of bad movie that you can laugh at despite it's being so sleazy. There are numerous bizarre choices made throughout, like the inclusion of a snarky gay character who beats up two rednecks in a bar and has some sort of sexual dysfunction that's introduced but never developed, and a seduction scene that revolves around the milking of a cow.

No one in the film was recognizable, for obviously good reasons once you see them act, with the exception of the actor who went on to play Larry on the T.V. show "Newhart."

Grade: C+