It’s time for something different for Nightmare Fuel. We’ve had 94 movies already (well, more when you take into account the multiples, like way back when with The Pit and the Pendulum), spanning all sorts of subjects from kaiju battles to vampires to zombies to ghosts to possessions to asshole kids. What the overwhelming majority of them, if not all of them (it’s hard to remember this year, kids, there’s been so many entries, cut me some slack), share, though, is a clearly fictional and traditional narrative. They’re all stories. It’s about time we had something that bucks that trend in favor of something different, like 2015’s Savageland.
Savageland presents itself not as a mockumentary, but as a fictional documentary, a documentary covering an event that didn’t happen with people that don’t technically exist. It’s not a found-footage situation, where a documentary crew getting set to do their thing was waylaid during production, but rather a fully-fledged fake documentary that goes to some decent lengths to look, sound, and feel like any other real documentary. The subject is a terrible event that occurred one night in the southern Arizona town of Sangre de Cristo. All 57 inhabitants of the town have seemingly vanished, with only blood trails into the desert as evidence of anything. Well, the blood trails and the one survivor: an illegal immigrant who happens to have taken a roll of photographs chronicling what happened that night. The film shows an outline of purported events based on the photographs, as well as the surrounding trial of the survivor and the usual local responses thereto. We even get an activist journalist, the kind that likes to stir of trouble in pursuit of exposing wrongdoings and the like.
It honestly feels pretty real, even if the event in question has left some major holes in order for things to progress smoothly with the desired narrative: I mean, the belief that one dude attacked and killed 57 people by hand (meaning without spraying bullets or something) and dragged them all out into the middle of nowhere all by himself over the course of a single night is a tough pill to logically swallow, but that also helps flesh out the rest of the story, like the (admittedly kinda superficial) examination and condemnation of local prejudice against immigrants, both legal and illegal. Indeed, our journalist friend is convinced that the survivor is being railroaded specifically because of the color of his skin and the icon on his passport. It’s an interesting angle to take with a horror film, but it works, allowing an investigation into a heinous act shine a spotlight on some of our country’s innate inequities and foibles. Whether or not you feel the message to be ham-fisted or even successful at all depends on your personal beliefs as well as your movie-watching eye and brain.
For me, it’s mostly successful, though the film has some major speed bumps. The acting is fairly uneven, with Lawrence Ross (an actual journalist who technically plays himself here) doing fairly well and George Savage (I can only imagine that’s a coincidence) feeling like a bit of a B-movie character actor from the ‘60s with his portrayal of local sheriff Parano. (It was also a nice surprise to see comic book writing legend Len Wein show up as an award-winning photographer who provides his two cents about the survivor’s pictures’ authenticity.) Speaking of, the photographs are the centerpieces of the whole film, with the central trial and crime pivoting about them, but they don’t get enough screen time, and though some of them look pretty good for what they are, others look either generic or too fake to work in context. Underlying everything, though, is the issue that if you don’t buy into the central conceit out of the gate, if the setup doesn’t grab you, you’re likely gonna be pretty damn bored here amongst the talking heads and whatnot.
And that’s ultimately the problem: The film’s ultimate success relies on selling the audience from the get-go, and I’m not sure it’s strong enough or creative enough to do. Personally, I mostly enjoyed it, though things dragged a bit when discussing the tight-lipped survivor, especially when the photos are so heavily hinted at and not yet shown, but this is very much not a film for everyone. If it sounds cool or interesting, give it a shot, you might find something unique to grab onto, but if not, I wouldn’t really bother.
Allusions of Grandeur 