Tags:
Film: Savage Weekend
Year: 1979
Director: David Paulsen
Writer: David Paulsen
Starring: Christopher Allport, Jim Doerr and David Gale
Review:
This is a movie that I’m not sure when I first heard about it. My guess would be through podcasts. It has been a while and not one that gets discussed much. This was one that came up on that list of recommendations so I tossed this out for an episode of Side Quest Podcast to discuss with my cohost Jake.
Synopsis: multiple couples head upstate to the country to watch a boat being built. Unfortunately, they are stalked by a murderer behind a ghoulish mask.
We start this in the country. There is a woman running through the woods as someone chases her. It turns out to be a man. We then see a running chainsaw that is picked up and he walks it toward the woman. This scene will be revisited later so I’m not sure if this was a dream or foreshadowing.
It is then in the city. We are in the apartment of Marie Sales Pettis (Marilyn Hamlin). She lives there with her son Jeremy (Adam Hirsch). Hanging out with her is her sister Shirley (Caitlyn O’Heaney) and her boyfriend Robert Fathwood (Jim Doerr). The boy’s father is Marie’s ex-husband. He shows up to pick up the boy for the weekend. His name is Greg (Jeff Pomerantz). There is bad blood here and he doesn’t much care for Robert, for good reason.
Marie, Shirley and Robert are going upstate for the weekend like the synopsis said. Robert is having a boat built. It sounds like he bought it as part of an estate as the earlier owner was building it himself but ran out of money. Otis (William Sanderson) is overseeing the construction of the boat, but from dialogue, I get the idea that he’s behind on the work. Robert has hired his friend Jay Alsop (Devin Goldenberg) to take over. He is coming up this weekend as well. Also joining them is a friend, Nicky (Christopher Allport). I get the idea that he’s gay.
They make their way north and stop off at a local store for gas. It is inside that Shirley finds a creepy mask. Nicky heads over to the local bar where he makes inappropriate comments to the bartender and then gets in a tussle with two lumbermen. This gets him kicked out. He messes them up before that happens though.
From here, they arrive at the place where they’re staying. They’re given the lay of the land by Otis as well as a local lumberman, Mac Macauley (David Gale). The sexual tension ramps up. Jay is married or he could be divorced, but he catches the attention of Shirley. She soon realizes that he’s a jerk. Mac is attracted to both sisters but comes on to Marie. Otis all the while is not happy with Robert for bringing Jay to take over the work on the boat. This is the least of their worries. Someone wearing the mask from the store starts to attack this group and picks them off one by one. Motives are generated as tensions raise as to who the killer could be.
That is where I’ll leave my recap and introduction to the characters. Where I want to start is that this is an odd slasher. There are good things here like the setting. I also like that it is a group of adults and not teens. That’s not to say that they don’t act like children at times, but I digress there. I like the mask the killer is wearing and the deaths are solid. We don’t necessarily get to see them all, but I come to expect that with slashers. I do have issues here that I’ll get into later.
Now that I’ve set that up, I want to delve deeper into this. The set up as I’ve said is good. We see that Marie needs a weekend away. She and her ex are tense. It seems that he was the press secretary for a disgraced politician. That stress contributed to their divorce. They have a son so I’m sure custody is another thing that has been argued about. She needs to get away. I’ll say that Hamlin was solid in her portrayal here.
Let’s then get into the group around her and why they could be the killer. Nicky is interesting in that I feel this is showing he’s gay, but there’s also an interaction with Shirley later that had me questioning that. It could be that he’s bisexual or even just metro where he likes to push buttons. There is quite a bit of him watching people from afar that made me wonder if he was the killer due to being ‘left out’. There is also Robert, just because he’s the new boyfriend. Jay is a jerk and a bit rough with Shirley at times, which made me think that there’s more to that. The best performance of these men to me was Allport. I’ve seen him in more things lately and I think he’s a solid, character actor from the era. Doerr and Goldenberg are solid as well.
Now there are two other potential killers that I want to include. First is Mac. He’s a lumberman. Seeing the chainsaw that he’s working with and then going back to the beginning sequence; I could see it him. He says weird things and comes on to Marie at one point forcefully. I know Gale from Re-Animator as the jerk professor so it was intriguing to see him in this role. There is also Otis who was the logical person that the movie is pushing as the killer. He has similar spying scenes like Nicky, but he’s also upset at Robert for bringing Jay to take over the boat construction. I thought Sanderson and Gale were solid in their roles as well.
I’ll then shift to filmmaking. What is interesting here looking at the date of release, this is a slasher film that came out after Black Christmas and Halloween, but before Friday the 13th. It makes sense to me now why the pacing is as slow as it is. It is closer to being a proto-slasher or gialli to be honest. It is a ‘who-done-it’. Personally, I found the pacing to be uneven. I like the sequence to start this and then it hits a wall pacing wise. It isn’t until the kills start back up that I got interested again. We focus too much on getting to know these characters who I don’t care for. I think they’re intriguing enough so I’ll give credit there since that is one aspect, I grade slashers. The other filmmaking parts are that the cinematography is fine. They don’t show many of the kills, but I’m guessing that could be budgetary. I think the array of weapons was good. I also thought the soundtrack was solid with that synth-wave feel it has.
There isn’t anything more to go into so in conclusion, this is fine. We get a good set up with isolating our group of characters in the country. They need their car to get away and that gets taken away later. I don’t necessarily like the characters but they’re distinct enough. I want more from the kills, but I like the array of weapons used. The look of the killer was good as well. There is a reveal that I guessed a couple minutes ahead of it and I thought it worked to be honest. This feels more like the early slashers or a gialli than ones that would come after Friday the 13th. Not a great movie. There are good things and others not so much, like the pacing. I’d still recommend it for when it came out regarding the slasher boom. Not for those that dislike that subgenre though.
My Rating: 6 out of 10