Review by Bill Brock
If horror movies are to be believed, the South is just a large interconnected web of dirt roads with creepy run down old houses occupied by inbred redneck families keen to kill people because the cable companies are assholes and won’t run cable to their houses and they are just plumb bored. Think of all the teens that could be saved if DirecTV went door to door offering services. Rainstorms might still lead to a few deaths but otherwise backwoods folks could veg out to 250+ channels in crystal clear clarity.
Savage County was produced by MTV and directed by a guy who saw Natural Born Killers and apparently quite liked it. It’s all shaky DV where the picture is either over-saturated or randomly colored or grainy. I kept getting the feeling that the director edited in Movie Maker and kept saying, “Oh shit! Look at all these effects!”
County has an unlikely collection of teens that seem less like friends and more like a cross section of MTV (one of the many fine channels offered on DirecTV) viewers heading out for swim and to drink a bit. The “characters” are introduced via admission letters, juvie reports and the High School newscast. It’s kinda like Feast but without the humor. After a few moments you’ll do like I did and just call them “that girl with the hair”, “nerdy guy” and so on. While hanging out at the pond one guy mentions to another guy that there is a creepy house with a reclusive family nearby who might be amused if they went and knocked on the door and ran away, because backwoods folk with guns are the perfect target for shenanigans and tomfoolery.
Well the hilarity is cut short when the guy in the house isn’t amused and pulls out a shotgun. One of the kids whacks him on the head with a shovel and kills him and we stumble into the I Know What You Did movies for a bit. The constant barrage of music videos and video games seem to have eroded the morals of these youths and they decide to not tell the police.
After they leave the house the other backwoods raving maniacs show up and find their kinfolk dead and, unsurprisingly, decide that revenge may be the best option. The crazy guys are “Otis as portrayed by Uncle Jessie”, “Fat Horny Retarded Guy” and “Fat Leatherface Guy Who Wears A Mask”. “Leatherface Guy” appears to be resistant to bullets because two people shoot at him at point blank range and miss.
Earlier at the pond, “blond girl” pushed “emo girl with punk rock hair” into the pond ‘cause “emo” didn’t appear to be having any fun. “Emo” went emo and wandered off into the woods alone. She shows up at the crazy guys’ house and causes the plot to start creaking as we have to get everyone back to the house to be killed.
Well, suffice it to say, various folks die and then other folks die. There’s a not terribly twisty twist. Revenge is had by both sides and the movie says, “Fuck it, I ain’t sequel baiting”.
A wise man once wrote that “a good movie is never too long and a bad movie is never too short”. County runs 78 minutes. Ten of it is the character intros at the start and 3 are the end credits. It still manages to feel 30 minutes too long. I kept wiggling the Wii remote to see how much time was remaining.
Should you watch it? No. You’d be better off just heading down a long dirt road and knocking on doors.
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