Savage Weekend (1979)

hyped garbage

How sad is this?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This is one of those films I acquired in the 50-pack Drive-in Collection. This is another one of their filler films. We all know that there will be some awful films in a 50-pack and this is one of them.It's another stereo-typical slasher film in way out in the backwoods of nowhere with lots of bluegrass music, women showing their boobs, sex and of course some killing. The story is lame - nothing to hold my attention for very long.I am going to rate this film a 2 instead of a 1 because I got a chuckle at the end of the film. Two guys fighting - the one grabs a machete and the other a chainsaw. The machete guy was wining then the 3rd guy pops up to grab the chainsaw and he ends the film.2/10

Several couples go to a woodland retreat in upstate New York to see a boat being built. The friends all get on each other's nerves and copulate with one another until a masked killer shows up to brutally crash their decadent grown-up bash.Writer/director David Paulsen does an expert job of crafting and sustaining a seedy rural atmosphere that's brimming with sexual tension and barely suppressed negative emotions, offers a flavorsome evocation of the moody sylvan setting, presents an interesting array of mean, cynical, and backbiting adult characters, delivers a few genuinely surprising moments (the sequence with a flamboyant gay man beating up a couple of belligerent rednecks in a bar is simply priceless!), stages the sadistic murder set pieces in a riveting realistic manner, cranks up the raw deviant sexuality to the seamy ninth degree (a sequence in a barn involving the suggestive milking of cow udders rates as a definite perverted highlight), and provides a satisfying serving of tasty gratuitous nudity and pretty raunchy semi-pornographic couplings. The solid acting by the capable cast keeps this picture on track: Christopher Allport as catty homosexual Nicky, Jim Doerr as the wimpy Robert, David Gale as rugged logger Mac Macauley, Devin Goldenberg as smarmy jerk Jay Alsop, Marilyn Hamlin as the forlorn Marie, Caitlin O'Heaney as shameless slut Shirley Sales, William Sanderson as scruffy and twitchy local yokel Otis, and Jeff Pomerantz as the bitter Greg Pottis. Zoltan Vidor's sunny cinematography makes neat occasional use of a hand-held camera and gives this movie an attractive sparkling look. Dov Seltzer's wonky synthesizer score does the flesh-crawling trick. A trashy treat.

Savage Weekend is quite an interesting movie. It's intriguing because, while it looks like many of the countless slice and dice flicks that made up the slasher cycle, it was in fact made some time before these films became popularised and clichéd. It displays some facets that would go on to constitute the classic style slasher film, yet it was made in 1976 and only released three years later in the wake of the huge success of Halloween (1978). It seems to clearly have been a movie somewhat ahead of its time in this respect. Its story is one that would go on to become fairly standard in this sub-genre. A group of rich urban friends travel to a remote location for from R&R, before long a masked psychopath begins picking them off.Notably, the characters here are adults, in this respect it deviates from the later slasher template which focused almost exclusively on teenagers. One thing these adults do have in common with their teenage descendants, however, is that they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time having sex. In fact Savage Weekend is pretty ram packed with abundant nudity. On the other hand, it also spends an unusually long time on the plot set-up, with a reasonable amount of character development before the killer finally kicks into action. Maybe it spends a little too long on the build-up in fairness, as it does feel at times that the movie could do with a little more thrills and suspense but in the final half hour, the bloody action is certainly ramped up.The cast was also quite notable for featuring a couple of actors who would go on to star in two 80's cult classics - William (Blade Runner) Sanderson and David (Re-Animator) Gale play a couple of the local hicks. The other most prominent presence in the film was unquestionably the boom mic, which popped up so often and in such hilariously prominent ways that I felt that it should really have been given a special mention in the end credits.

A group of New Yorkers travel upstate for the weekend where they upset the locals and find themselves stalked by a deranged killer wearing a rubber horror mask.The moment screaming queen Nicky (Christopher Allport) started kicking redneck ass in a bar room brawl, I guessed that Savage Weekend wasn't going to be just another average everyday backwoods slice 'n' dice horror; scenes like that don't happen in 'normal' slashers. Sure enough, although the film delivers several of the expected genre clichés (gratuitous nudity, a masked killer, suspicious hillbillies etc.), there is simply too much off-kilter weirdness and sleaze on display to pigeon-hole this one as a routine slasher flick.Take the movie's collection of characters, for example, whose behaviour is far from predictable...Middle-aged stockbroker Robert Fathwood (Jim Doerr) is dating sexy Marie Sales (Marilyn Hamlin), who is on the rebound having just split with her husband Greg (Jeff Pomerantz), who is having a personal crisis after his boss committed suicide. Marie, however, still fantasises about Greg during sex, and also likes to flirt with local bit of rough Mac Macauley (David Gale) by suggestively stroking his tractor's hydraulics. Macauley eventually succumbs to Marie's advances (after she suggestively fondles one of his cow's udders) but discovers that she is just being a tease. Marie's hot-to-trot sister Shirley (Caitlin O'Heaney), on the other hand, is a genuine goer: she enjoys sunbathing nude and has impromptu outdoor sex with Jay (Devin Goldenberg), one of Robert's employees, under the watchful gaze of the group's only gay member Nicky, who she later tries to seduce by doing a sexy tango for him in her undies. Meanwhile, local weirdo Otis (William Sanderson), who allegedly branded his unfaithful wife with the letter 'H' (for 'whore'), spends his spare time in the graveyard chatting to his dead brother!After an hour of watching these characters interacting (i.e. mostly flirting and having sex)—and dodging the boom mic (which makes regular appearances)—the mysterious killer turns up to off the city folk one by one, via hanging, hat-pin in the ear, table saw activated by light switch (that old chestnut), and defenestration. The identity of the killer is then revealed (I won't say who it is, but it's not too hard to figure out), Marie gets chased a bit, and there's a chainsaw/machete fight.Like I said… not just another average everyday backwoods slice 'n' dice horror.