Entry 83: Savage Weekend (1976)

Savage Weekend (1976)

Dir: David Paulsen

"You have been chosen.  You are doomed.  Prepare for...SAVAGE WEEKEND."

 
A movie can't be ALL bad when it opens with a strung-out looking Bill Sanderson (Blade Runner, TV's Deadwood) murdering a woman with a chainsaw, can it?  Yes...yes, it can.  If you REALLY have nothing better to do, I guess you can come down with me to the basement and "enjoy" the patience-trying tedium of...Savage Weekend.
  
In this overly-talky proto-slasher, four upstate NY stock brokers travel to the rural countryside for a weekend getaway.  Our well-to-do weekenders consist of Robert (Jim Doerr), Jay (Devin Goldenberg, The Last Horror Film), Marie (Marilyn Hamlin, Shaft's Big Score) and Nicky (Christopher Allport, Invaders from Mars, To Live and Die in L.A., here playing a refreshingly ass-kicking gay character.  It's the 70s, so he's fey as shit, but at least he gets to beat the fuck out of a bar full of rednecks).  Meanwhile, sweaty, stringy-haired local Otis (Sanderson) wanders around a graveyard muttering to himself before directly addressing one of the tombstones.  In flashback, we see unbalanced Otis beat his brother to death for fucking his girlfriend.  He then proceeds to brand the poor girl with an "H" for "whore ('Otis ain't too bright.')."  Otis skulks around spying on these wealthy out-of-towners as they copulate with various ready-and-willing locals.  In the film's strangest scene, Nicky cuts his hands on barbed wire while watching Jay fuck a voluptuous local girl.  After endless scenes of talking, fucking and one sanity-doubting scene in which a woman jerks off a goddamn COW'S UTTER in an attempt to turn on a distracted would-be lover, someone in a monster mask begins killing off the out-of-town folks one-by-one.  Is it crazy Otis?  Is it local handyman David Gale (Re-Animator, From Beyond), who doesn't appreciate these yuppies invading his turf?  By this point, I didn't give a fuck, and you won't, either.

This is a boring, BORING movie, filled with repellent and thoroughly unlikable characters talking endlessly about a bunch of boring nonsense before being killed off in incredibly boring fashion.  If I can give ANY credit at all to this exercise in tedium, it's that it did predate the "promiscuous characters get offed by a masked maniac" formula of slasher progenitor Halloween by two years, and the performances by Sanderson, Allport and Gale are inspired enough to rise above the bland material.  Savage Weekend was lensed in 1976, released (barely) by a pre-Golan-Globus Cannon in 1979, then rereleased in 1981 to lure a few bucks away from unsuspecting moviegoers during the post-Friday the 13th slasher boom.  I really feel for those folks.  For a MUCH better out-of-their-element yuppies versus angry rural folk horror flick, check out 1977's Rituals instead.