Whether known by Savage Harbor or Death Feud, this flick is one of those direct-to-video numbers in which nameless bad guys get shot while standing at the top of hills and stairwells so the camera can catch them taking a tumble, because such action is cheaper than an explosion on the beach. But there’s one of those, too.
And also Frank Stallone (Terror in Beverly Hills), so this sack of garbage already is three-for-three.
Stallone dons a stupid cap to play Joe, a longshoreman on leave who saves a woman named Anne (Karen Mayo-Chandler, Out of the Dark) from being raped. Joe and Anne immediately fall in love, and why shouldn’t they with such deep conversations as this, presented in full:
Joe: “Do you like avocados?”
Anne: “What?”
Joe: “Just a thought.”
Annnnnd scene.
After a romantic montage featuring outercourse in the park, Joe proposes to Anne before he has to leave for six months. She accepts. Unfortunately, Anne is on the run from Harry (Anthony Caruso, Mean Johnny Barrows), a human trafficker whose goons catch up to her, kidnap her from a grocery store and plunge her full of so much smack that she’ll work as a sex slave.
The horse works so well that she thinks every trick is Joe, rubbing her gartered-and-pantied self all over random guys as she groggily coos his name on loop. When Joe returns to shore, he sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong in order to find his beloved. And when he does, ooh, Harry better watch out! I’d say the rest of this sentence were a spoiler if it weren’t a compelling reason to watch: Joe shoots him in the dick.
Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline existing to achieve the magic 90-minute running time, we follow Joe’s fellow sailor buddy, Bill (Christopher Mitchum, The Executioner Part II), who claims he “can eat 40 eggs an hour.” Bill also finds love, with two-bit bar stripper Roxey, she of the Santa-hat pasties. That she’s played by Lisa Loring, The Addams Family’s former Wednesday all grown up (and out), makes the match — and the movie — that much weirder.
One could accuse the final film of writer/director/producer Carl Monson (Please Don’t Eat My Mother!) of being misogynistic … and one would be right. Outside of extras, each and every one of its female characters toils in the trade of transactional flesh. However, it would be unfair to reduce Savage Harbor to that label … because it’s also homophobic. What DTV actioner of the time wasn’t?
By no measure is Savage Harbor good, but it does feature Don’t Answer the Phone’s corpulent killer Nicholas Worth as one of Harry’s minions, another minion being dragged through California traffic by a rope, as well as an attempted assassination by trash truck. Not every movie can make such a double-barreled claim. —Rod Lott