Savageland

I went back and forth on 3 stars or 3 1/2 a number of times. To be honest, I'm still not sure what to score it. You might say a half star isn't that big of a deal, but here, it is. That half a star is the difference between saying this is a flawed but effective movie, and a movie barely keeping its head above water, a notch above from mediocrity. In the end, I had to go with six, for two reasons. The movie is a horror documentary with a chilling concept: a small town -- a little over 50 people -- in Arizona very near the US/Mexico border is killed. Everybody in town -- 57 people in all, including a few people from a neighboring town -- is murdered in exceptionally gruesome fashion (the movie mentions only 7 bodies were complete enough to visually ID). The lone survivor is also the only suspect. That lone survivor is also an illegal immigrant who has been living in the town for seven years. That lone survivor is also an amateur photographer. Whether he is guilty or not -- even though, as the movie begins, the suspect is already convicted and awaiting the death penalty -- is the issue of the mcckumentary. To go into more detail would derail the purpose of the movie, and if you're interested, I'd rather you make your own judgment, so I'm going to have to be circumspect. What I will say is that the suspect's guilt hinges on whether or not you believe in the authenticity of photographs he took as he went through the town during the night of the massacre. About a half hour into the movie, you start to see what's on the photographs, and, combined with the suspect's story, paint a very different, if still incomplete, picture of the events that killed an entire town. I mentioned that the movie has two problems. Problem number one is about those photographs. I have a strong aversion to found footage horror. I've never seen a single one I enjoy, because the concept of someone holding a camera as they're stuck in a house with a serial killer, or being chased by a zombie, or an interdimensional kaiju is coming through town, breaks the immersion. It's downright ludicrous that anybody would be in the middle of a situation like this and keep filming. Savageland asks you to believe that the suspect took a still camera -- not video -- with him as he ran into town and took THIRTY-SEVEN PICTURES of what was really causing the bloodshed. The movie attempts to explain this with expert testimony; one person says he was always taking pictures of roadkill and children and whatever he saw, so taking pictures of this trail of death as he's running for his life just fits his normal behavior. Another person -- a professional photographer -- says that photogs feel invincible behind the camera. A third person almost literally hand-waives away the question, basically saying "who knows why, it doesn't matter". YES, IT DOES MATTER, because as impossible as it is to believe someone would remain calm enough to keep a camera focused on something horrific while in the middle of it, it's more than impossible to ask them to do this THIRTY-SEVEN SEPARATE TIMES. Even if most of the pictures are blurry and taken in motion, it's still asking the audience to swallow he had the wherewithal to bring the camera to his eye and snap off pictures like he's in a JC Penney studio. I appreciate the movie attempting to explain it away, but by giving us three different reasons, it's not letting us make up our own minds about it; it's lamp-shading it. It's saying "it could be anything, who cares, moving on". And the other problem is the way this movie handles the racial aspect of the main suspect and racial relations at large. Virtually every local from the neighboring town or local law enforcement interviewed, with the exception of one person, is portrayed as a racist that blames illegal immigration for all of America's ills. I don't have a problem with this being a plot element, and I don't have a problem with these characters existing in a movie; we have seen in the past five years that racism is, unfortunately, alive and well. But what this movie doesn't do is actually say anything about the racism. It's one thing to weave in a hot-button topic into your movie. Candyman (1992) does a marvelous job mixing racial issues into its movie, actually contributing to the conversation. The second remake of Black Christmas, on the other hand, is so ham-handed and overt in its "all men are evil" messaging, it derails the movie and turns it into one big preach-fest. At least, though, even with the Black Christmas remake, they introduced an issue and said something about it. They didn't light a fire and walk away, and that's what Savageland does. It has nothing to say about the racism and nationalism on display. It tries to say he was railroaded because he was an illegal immigrant, but that just doesn't wash with the logic and the scenario the movie has set up. Race may be driving why local people want him to be executed, but he's the suspect for the same reason the spouse is always the first suspect -- because they survived, and they're right there. And hey, maybe the movie's makers didn't want to make a commentary on the racial issues. But that begs the question then of why introduce it at all. Why not set it in some remote backwater in Montana? Why make the suspect Mexican and not, say, Japanese or Jamaican or American Indian? Why not any nationality that isn't constantly propped up as a boogeyman by white nationalists? The movie wants to use the issue of racism, but it doesn't want to reckon with it. I can't deny the movie is dripping in atmosphere. The story itself is well-told outside of the two issues mentioned. And I love that you don't get all the answers you expect, or that you see any of the carnage as it happens. It leaves a lot up to the imagination, which is almost always creepier than any movie monster conceived by man. But its failure to adequately justify the central conceit on which this movie's plot hangs, and the glib use of racial tensions and nationalism as a plot point, drag this movie down a bunch. Had it solved either one of those, this would be a 3 1/2. Had it solved both, an easy 8, maybe even an 8 1/2. The base story is that good. But those issues are huge anchors, and they keep the movie from being all it could be.