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DEFENCELESS
A recent shot-on-video feature by Australia’s Mark Savage that’s likely his best film. It’s an arty, dialogue-free variant on revenge potboilers like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, set on and around the scenic Australian coastline. The title, obviously, is ironic.
The Package
If you’ve never heard of Mark Savage you’re not alone; I hadn’t either
until the release of Subversive Cinema’s 2006 “SAVAGE SINEMA FROM DOWN UNDER”
DVD set featuring the Savage opuses MARAUDERS (1987), SENSITIVE NEW AGE KILLER
(1999), STAINED (2006) and DEFENCELESS: A BLOOD SYMPHONY (2004). All were shot
on extremely low budgets and are jam-packed with sex and violence.
Unfortunately, they’re not all particularly good, proving that energy and
enthusiasm aren’t always enough to ensure a successful film (this is
particularly true of the filmmaker’s less-than-auspicious debut MARAUDERS, which
according to the packaging was “bootlegged for over twenty years” even though
it’s only existed for nineteen).
DEFENCELESS is the stand-out, having been shot with
very little money around the coasts of Victoria, AU by Savage, who acted as
writer, director, cinematographer and editor. His brother Colin, a fixture of
Savage’s films since MARAUDERS, appears in the cast and co-producer Susanne
Hausschmid headlines. Hausschmid previously worked with Savage on the erotic
thrillers FISHNET and TRAIL OF PASSION--no, I haven’t heard of those films
either!
The Story
An attractive woman finds herself in the sights of three wealthy land
developers who want to tear down her beachfront home. She refuses to sell her
property and so the developers, who also dabble in kiddie porn, initiate a
ruthless campaign of violence and intimidation. First they kill the woman’s
husband and her young son; she’s chastised but refuses to bow to their demands,
assuaging her grief by initiating a lesbian relationship with a young woman
living nearby. The determined developers promptly kill the young woman but our
heroine still refuses to bend, and so the murderers set their sights on her,
drowning her on a beach after a vicious gang rape.
A bit later a young girl, terrorized by her abusive stepfather, discovers
an apparently dead body on the beach where the heroine breathed her last. It
turns out the body belongs to our heroine, who’s somehow risen from the
dead...and now has an insatiable craving for human flesh! She strikes up a
friendship with the girl, which ends up short-lived when the girl’s stepfather
strangles her to death. The now-undead protagonist witnesses the act and makes
the perpetrator her first victim.
Next she goes after the three guys who killed her. One
of them she hacks up and another gets his cock mutilated; as for the ringleader
of the trio, he’s tied spread-eagled to a bed frame and forced to eat his own
severed dick! Our cannibalistic diva further stokes her hunger by devouring the
flesh of her victims, after which she heads back to the sea and disappears
therein.
The Direction
This film, as outlined above, is notable for the fact that it contains NO
dialogue and very little sync sound, a gutsy choice that pays off. The
soundtrack is dominated by a disarmingly serene score by George Papinocalaou
that’s a big improvement over those of Mark Savage’s other pictures (cheesy
synthesizer muzak being a sore point of the SAVAGE CINEMA DVD set), and there
are even some cues lifted from Mozart’s REQUIEM that work quite well. The
nuanced digital photography is also above-average, with a slick, professional
sheen.
As in all his features, Savage is mighty generous with the sauce, giving us
flesh slashing, penis whacking, strangulation, child abuse and a disturbing bout
of self-mutilation. The picture isn’t subtitled A BLOOD SYMPHONY for nothing.
Much of the red stuff, though, is patently fake:
there’s only so much a filmmaker, even one as bloodthirsty as Savage, can
accomplish on such an obviously limited budget. Luckily violence isn’t all this
film has to offer. It has an artful--and arty--nuance you won’t find in
too many other SOV gorefests. But I’d advise against taking the proceedings too
seriously, as DEFENCELESS ultimately delivers exactly what it promises and
little more: a tough, nasty little revenge potboiler--and as such it works.
Vital Statistics
DEFENCELESS: A BLOOD
SYMPHONY
Subversive Cinema/S&M Productions
Director/Screenplay/Cinematography/Editing: Mark Savage
Producers: Mark Savage, Susanne Hausschmid
Cast: Susanne Hausschmid, George Gladstone, Erin Walsh, Anthony Thomas, Bethany
Fisher, Colin Savage, Richard Wolstencroft, Nikita Fisher, Mitchell Turner,
Craig Sayers