Savage Harbor

Stallone and Mitchum together in the same film! Not Sly and Robert, but the first one’s brother and the other one’s son. Frank Stallone and Christopher Mitchum both so closely resembled their famous relatives that they became sough-after actors for low-budget trash flicks, which they willingly signed up for. The producers of those movies simply relied on the fact that customers of video rental shops would confuse the names and they could fob off a flick with a Stallone that, however, cost a tiny fraction of Sly’s blockbusters. Savage Harbor does not in any way deny this calculus, so we don’t concern ourselves much with the screenplay or with any other viewer attractions. When it comes to action, it’s not enough to marvel only at the extent of artless hollowness, but also at the strict adherence to genre logic, regardless of the production shortcomings. So, when the screenplay calls for the bad guy to shield himself from gunfire and there is only a chain-link fence, then he simply hides behind it. The whole film is similarly random, not only in the sudden eruptions of bullshit in the direction, but also in the dialogue, the screenplay and even the synopsis. A sailor on shore leave falls in love with a runaway prostitute and wants to buy an avocado farm with her, but her past catches up with her, so the sailor and his sidekick set out to look for her after returning from a six-month voyage. At its core, Savage Harbor is actually a variation on Popeye – the protagonist is a good-guy sailor who likes to feast on something green and wants the woman whom the villainous, obese antagonist wants for himself. This dreck, which didn’t cause much of a stir in video rental shops, has rightly sunk into oblivion, though when seen from the proper perspective, it does offer satisfactory entertainment, albeit mainly at the expense of the limited register of most of the actors (the best of whom turns out to be Greta Blackburn in the role of the good-hearted prostitute). After all, Frank Stallone recalls that when he watched the film with his brother at the time, they rolled on the floor laughing. In addition to the mighty mullets worn by the lead actors, the status of this bizarre curiosity is enhanced by the casting of the supporting roles. Besides Anthony Carus, a creditable portrayer of bad guys in the final years of the golden age of Hollywood, the former child star Lisa Loring, who once shone brightly as Wednesday in the classic black-and-white The Addams Family and here plays a stripper in love with Mitchum’s hero, deserves mention. (18.01.2021)