An early "slasher film" that either predates Halloween by two years or comes the year after (Stylistic cues point to the latter). It concerns a group of New York yuppies drawing the ire of white-trash hired hands and a masked psycopath in the Upstate boonies.
Up until maybe two years ago I'd never heard of it, but it's definitely got the kind of slasher film ambiance that I like. A sleazy, off-center and oddly effective piece of nudity-laden, drive-in exploitation filmmaking. It's got the late David Gale (Re-Animator) as a strapping, porn-mustachioed, hillbilly cocksman, it has William Sanderson (Newhart, Deadwood) as an uber-creepy, sexually frustrated bumpkin / carpenter (at the embryonic stage of a 30 year-long experiment in method acting) and slasher film also-ran, Caitlin O'Heaney (He Knows You're Alone) as "Kathleen Heaney", looking absurdly hot, curvy, and frequently devoid of clothing as the "final girl's" wayward sister.
Savage Weekend is different in that the victims are adults, not teenagers, and that unlike most of its slasher film bretheren, which substituted the "all-in", sexual frankness of the giallo with blunt, generally flavorless violence and peepshow coup d’oeil, this film is highly-sexualized and, on occasion, genuinely creepy and suspenseful.
Don't get me wrong, this is not some lost masterpiece, it's very silly and the production value is often on par with Screech's fuck video, but it is something of a gem for containing a scene of onanistic cow-milking, and a great moment in which the late Christopher Allport's nelly, gay character (Heaney's BGFF) uses his Bronx-Fu style to kick the living shit out of two homophobes in a bar. We also have the film's strange attempt to acquit itself of its depiction of rural types with a revelation and rescue that, if you pay the slightest bit of attention to the film and ignore all of the red herrings, you can see coming from a mile away.
Also, you might notice a young, pre-crackhead Yancy Butler in the latter part of the film as Gale's 6-9 year-old daughter
Up until maybe two years ago I'd never heard of it, but it's definitely got the kind of slasher film ambiance that I like. A sleazy, off-center and oddly effective piece of nudity-laden, drive-in exploitation filmmaking. It's got the late David Gale (Re-Animator) as a strapping, porn-mustachioed, hillbilly cocksman, it has William Sanderson (Newhart, Deadwood) as an uber-creepy, sexually frustrated bumpkin / carpenter (at the embryonic stage of a 30 year-long experiment in method acting) and slasher film also-ran, Caitlin O'Heaney (He Knows You're Alone) as "Kathleen Heaney", looking absurdly hot, curvy, and frequently devoid of clothing as the "final girl's" wayward sister.
Savage Weekend is different in that the victims are adults, not teenagers, and that unlike most of its slasher film bretheren, which substituted the "all-in", sexual frankness of the giallo with blunt, generally flavorless violence and peepshow coup d’oeil, this film is highly-sexualized and, on occasion, genuinely creepy and suspenseful.
Don't get me wrong, this is not some lost masterpiece, it's very silly and the production value is often on par with Screech's fuck video, but it is something of a gem for containing a scene of onanistic cow-milking, and a great moment in which the late Christopher Allport's nelly, gay character (Heaney's BGFF) uses his Bronx-Fu style to kick the living shit out of two homophobes in a bar. We also have the film's strange attempt to acquit itself of its depiction of rural types with a revelation and rescue that, if you pay the slightest bit of attention to the film and ignore all of the red herrings, you can see coming from a mile away.
Also, you might notice a young, pre-crackhead Yancy Butler in the latter part of the film as Gale's 6-9 year-old daughter
