Savage

Director: Jordan Blum

Cast: Martin Kove, Tony Becker, Lisa Wilcox, Anna Enger, Shane Callahan

(MTI; US theatrical: 20 Sep 2011 (General release); 2009)

Bigfoot must be so pissed - that is, if the argued over and rumored half-man, half-ape throwback missing link wannabe even exists. From the late ‘60s and early ‘70s where it was a mainstay of In Search of… style television exposes to the new millennium where every myth is an ironic joke just waiting for a hipster comic to cut it apart, the legendary Sasquatch has dropped down many significant cultural pegs. Sure, for the areas which supposedly house the North American Yeti, the creature is still important. But for others, the smelly skunk monkey is just a punchline looking for a set-up to send it off.

Luckily, the makers of Savage have tried to give the famed monster a more menacing import. As the centerpiece of this otherwise average horror film, this Bigfoot is cruel, callous, fast, ferocious, and more than capable of carving up his random victims. While the beast is indeed bad-ass, the narrative surrounding him needs a bit of work.
  
In Bear Valley National Park, a series of unexplained killings have local ranger Owen Fremont (Tony Becker) concerned. With a forest fire raging out of control and a group of missing firemen MIA, he believes that rogue animals are responsible. To keep things from descending into chaos, he needs all the help he can get. In the meantime, the Mayor and the man in charge of the Park Services are cooking up a scheme to revitalize the area. It doesn’t seem wholly on the up and up.

Elsewhere, a couple on the lam have decided to hide out in the area, hoping to avoid capture and poach a few animals. Similarly, a geeky scientist has hired suspect mountain man Jack Lund (Martin Kove) to take him deep into the woods to find Bigfoot. Seems there have been several sightings of the creature over the years, and our duo want to discover his whereabouts…and divvy up the fame. Unfortunately, this is one beast that’s not going down without a fight.

As you can tell by the plot synopsis, Savage is a bit too story heavy for its own good. Just when we think we’ll be getting down to some mean monster mayhem, when ‘it’ of enlarged tootsies is going to go buck and bleed out the entire region, director Jordan Blum shifts over to one of the many side concepts, and things go cockeyed. At first, it’s the dull deal between the two escaped criminals. What do we eventually learn after spending far too much time with this pair? Well, that he’s abusive and she’s wanted for murder. Really necessary to our night of terror, right? Or how about the uber dork who secures the services of the artist formerly known as the leader of the Cobra Kai. While Kove redeems himself with a sincere, self-effacing performance, their dialogue is all drips and drabs from a trip to Comic-Con.

These ancillary elements plague Savage, stealing much of its forward motion and feeling of dread. When Blum stays within the standard man vs. nature routine, when things are anchored soundly within the carnivore and its prey dynamic, we buy the fright facets. We get involved in the stalk and slay and want to see what happens when our title fiend finds itself face to face with something other than a backwoods bumbler. Blum adds a few nice touches to the conceit, making Bigfoot much more of a familiar forest dweller (running in a crouch like position to avoid low lying limbs, accenting an ability to jump over and up trees) and when minus the misleading misdirection, we actually feel some suspense. But just like many indie horror films that don’t know when to leave well enough alone, Savage keeps padding. Granted, without these subtexts the film would be five minutes long, but with them, the boredom begins.

Luckily, the performances also push us more toward entertainment than aggravation. Becker may have a coffee cup surgically strapped to his hand (he is more addicted to rural Joe than Special Agent Dale Cooper) and delivers each line like he’s dressing down a bunch of Boy Scouts, but he does have the presence to make you believe in his character’s concerns. Similarly, a bunch of bad teeth and a Burning Man wardrobe can’t alter Kove’s jolly persona. Elsewhere, the no-namers acquit themselves admirably. They don’t try to save the film themselves and always find the measured response the role requires. Even in cases where their parts are ill-defined, they deliver.

That just leaves Blum and his screenwriters to stand up and be counted, and for the most part, they fall victim to a variety of predictable pitfalls. Making the Mayor and the Park Director guilty of subterfuge doesn’t make for interesting added color. Instead, it tends to muck things up. Since we know there is some involvement with the fire on their part, we keep waiting for a denouement that almost doesn’t arrive. Similarly, we spend a great deal of time watching the situation being set-up between our outlaw lovebirds. Yet little is actually explained. We have to wait until well into the third act before we discover what they did and why we should fear/cheer them. The premise here is ripe for something scary - a disaster diverted creature, out of its usual food source, seeks man as a meal replacement. Blum begins here, and then gets carried away with unnecessary tangents.

Still, for what it represents, Savage is interesting if innocuous. When Charles Pierce’s “classic” The Legend of Boggy Creek is a far superior scare experience, you know you’ve got your work cut out for you. In that 1972 effort, the filmmaker stayed true to his source, resisting the urge to “gussy up” things with narrative nonsense. Like the headlining years of its mythos, a standard Bigfoot story can shock the living daylights out of someone. The unknown in the wild is far more frightening than any backroom wheeling and dealing. Since its heyday, everyone’s favorite biped has been treated like trash. Thankfully, Savage strives to make him horrifying once again. Too bad there’s more fluff than ferociousness here.