3 out of 5

Directed by: Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan

A very collected, well-conceived mockumentary, Savageland’s horror-adjacent pitch stings with its social commentary, but is probably stretched a bit thin for a ninety minute runtime, pretty much arriving at its point literally a few minutes in, and not being shy about it. Directors / writers Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan do a great job of breaking things up across “interviews” and “evidence” of the massacre which is the story’s focus, using a central map graphic of the featured location to keep us engaged as we move through a timeline; once you hit close to the hour mark, though, a question of And…? starts to crop up, which perhaps led to the flick somewhat jumping the shark when trying to put together its conclusion.

‘Savageland’ covers the tragedy at Sangre De Cristo, a bordertown of, previously, 57 residents… all slaughtered over the course of a night, save Francisco Salazar, who becomes the police’s surefire “he done did it” target, despite there not being any real forensic evidence to confirm that. …And despite a series of photos taken by Salazar that night, which blurrily show what look like undead creatures, viciously attacking the town.

The film doesn’t have its interviewees mince words: the white locals of the nearby towns are flagrantly racist (Sangre De Cristo is pejoratively called by the film’s title, and is considered to be full of “illegals”), and are convinced that Salazar went primal and did the deed, and thank god for the USA and law and etc. Meanwhile, it’s clear to the psychologist that interviews Salazar – from which we see some clips – and the journalist who’s written a book on the matter, that something else happened here, and Francisco was just the wrong skin-colored patsy the town sheriff and local Rush Limbaugh-type needed.

But I mentioned that the film was “collected:” I mean this in that it doesn’t need to overreach to make its points. The way everyone speaks in the interviews is all too believable, saying things that might as well be from the Trump-era of politics (…this film was from 2015…), and while it would have been easy to push some of these figures into Southern parody, the tone is kept shy of that.

The photos from the event, spliced through the film’s coverage of what happened, are appropriately haunting, but in the same way that it’s soon clear that we’re not going to be able to do much with this information except nod at it, there’s no real build up of the content of these pics: you see blurry, wild looking ghouls, and that’s what you’ll see for the rest of the movie. Some slightly less convincing performances / recordings later on don’t do much to ratchet up the tension. Thankfully, our main interviews are solid, and Noe Montes, playing Francisco, though mostly silent, looks appropriately haunted by what he’s witnessed.

It’s a solid movie, but in trying to play both the reality and horror cards at the same time, Savageland can’t push very far in either direction, and you’ll sense that long before the runtime is up.