1 out of 5

Directed by: Olaf Ittenbach

…What?

There’s the argument (that I’m making up right now) that if you’d want to quickly get desensitized to gore, you could jump in at the deep end with August Underground or the Guinea Pig series, but even though the overkill method is sort of a way to set the bar at a level that makes the whole thing seem ridiculous (and thus less affecting), most movies that fall into that bucket come bundled with a sense of disgust – a ‘why am I watching this and why was it made’ vibe (calm down, meta fans: whatever the makers’ claims, this is unintentional) that makes it hard to assess if the end is worth the trip.  So instead, travel to the world of utter schlock, and watch something like Savage Love.  Ittenbach has the makeup chops to deliver some effective gore, but that’s not really what’s on display here.  This is barrel bottom, nigh-scriptless, people-wandering-into-takes nonsense, and it sets the bar like half-buried and half made out of noodles and half un-bar and you can’t help but start to see how ridiculous the whole horror scene is: imagining people having to act frightened while rubber bodies and splashy blood are thrown at them.  It’s undeniably “gory” in a sense that took effort from makeup and props, but man it makes it hard to take real gore seriously afterward.  So there’s that.

Was Savage Love a serious attempt?  I have no idea.  There are moments where Ittenbach seems to actually want it to have a plot, and there are visual “references” to, like, Dead Alive or From Dusk Til Dawn, but man, otherwise, I must’ve checked the clock like every few minutes.  And yes, I think I know what I’m getting into with Ittenbach, which is to expect a B-movie slog with lots of chopped up bodies, but, uh, this was somehow far beneath what I was expecting.

Two perverts go somewhere to be perverted and… get attack by Satan’s brood.  Something something zombies.