Mitchum. Stallone. Christopher Mitchum and Frank Stallone, that is, together at last as merchant seamen who get themselves entangled in a feud with an evil pimp and his henchmen after Frank Stallone's Joe falls in love with one of the pimp's ladies of the evening who has fled the lifestyle. The couple's meet-cute closely follows one of the most insane, physics-defying shootouts in cinema history. What follows may be well-worn territory, plot-wise, but the delivery of that plot is one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Savage Harbor is a classic of accidental surrealism and an example of one of my favorite cinematic happenings — a deeply weird movie that thinks it's being conventional made by demented freaks who think they're normal dudes.
Here are just a few examples of what I mean by accidental surrealism. In one scene with Mitchum and Stallone walking away from the docks after a stretch at sea, the actors' exchange of conversational dialogue appears on the soundtrack, but their lips aren't moving. In another scene at the dive bar hangout of our main characters, Mitchum is seen at the bar drinking a beer, but the patron next to him abruptly changes into a completely different person mid-scene. Both extras stare directly into the camera. In the film's opening scenes, Christmas decorations appear and idle chat about the Christmas season occurs. After a title card reading "SIX MONTHS LATER," it's still the Christmas season. Christmas never ends in San Pedro, apparently. (Has anyone asked Mike Watt if this is true?) In a scene on the evil pimp's boat, he's reading a book. Otherwise portrayed as a meathead creep who would never pick up any reading material unless it had nude ladies or get-rich-quick schemes in it, he closes the book when his henchmen arrive and remarks to them shortly before tossing the hardback tome their way: "Aristotle. Good reading. The man had a fine mind." As I said in the preceding paragraph, we also get some physics-defying action scenes. Men are standing up straight when they get shot but are somehow propelled forward long distances as if being shot from a cannon. In one scene, an inflatable life raft on a sandy beach explodes for no discernible reason. I love this shit.
The evil pimp, Harry (Anthony Caruso), opens proceedings on the California coast. He pulls up in his limo, smoking a cigar, and exits the vehicle but remains close to it. Several anonymous henchmen are stationed nearby. We'll get to know two of these henchmen, assistant evil pimp and number two man on the totem pole Slim (Gary Wood) and burly giggling freakazoid Hank (b-movie legend Patrick Wright), later. One of Harry's stable, a heroin-addicted mini-skirted British babe named Anne (the late Karen Mayo-Chandler, a model turned b-movie actor and one-time girlfriend of Jack Nicholson who described Nicholson as "a non-stop sex machine"), eventually exits the limo as well. This motley crew is waiting at the coast for a delivery of Chinese sex workers purchased by Harry. A life raft containing the women and a few evil dudes who negotiated the deal is soon spotted nearing the coast. For some reason, the raft flips over in the water. Some of the henchmen attempt to help but notice that the women are white, not Chinese. This is some kind of weird sabotage. But why? We'll never know, but we do get that deeply insane physics-defying shootout because of the ol' Chinese-to-American switcheroo. This scene is hilarious, exciting, stupid, and completely nuts.
Anne uses the shootout as an opportunity to escape Harry's clutches. She flees to a nearby highway and hitchhikes with a lecherous creep who keeps leering at her mini-skirted gams like they're a t-bone steak. When they get back to the city, he pounces on her. Joe (Frank Stallone, who looks a lot like his famous brother except with 74% less charisma) happens to be walking by and rescues her from the creep. After she thanks him, they stare at each other blankly and expressionlessly for what seems like a minute in what I think the filmmaker is trying to portray as love at first sight, but these two have less than zero chemistry. (I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but Mayo-Chandler was not a very good actor, at least in this movie.) Joe asks Anne if she likes avocados. We then get a montage of romantic moments between the two that defies the laws of time and space. Have hours gone by? Days? Weeks? Months? Yes. The only clue to the jumping chronology is that Anne wears several different mini-skirts. The two kiss like no humans have ever kissed before. I mean that sentence literally. I'm not saying they were passion-filled lovers kissing their brains out. I'm saying Frank Stallone and/or his character Joe and Karen Mayo-Chandler and/or her character Anne kiss each other like they are alien beings wearing human suits from a planet where kissing does not exist. Someone told them vaguely what kissing was, and they are experimenting with that limited knowledge trial-and-error-style. You have never seen two people kiss like this. You have never kissed like this, no matter how inept your first kiss.
The kissing is wild, but things get exponentially weirder when they have a make-out session in a grassy field on pillows placed directly on the ground. These pillows look too new and nice to be tossed onto the ground, but these two are maniacs. Anne does this kind of half-hearted rubbing and clawing thing on Joe's chest hair, like a drugged cat trying to figure out how to use a scratching post. They do some more weird kissing and weird loud moaning, and then they dry-hump on the nice pillows in the open field. What the hell is going on?
Meanwhile, Joe's best buddy and fellow merchant seamen Bill (Christopher Mitchum, who looks exactly like his famous dad except with 99% less charisma and an impressive blonde mullet) is embarking on a little romance of his own with the sole exotic dancer at the merchant seamen dive bar Tradewinds, Roxey (Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday on The Addams Family TV show!!!). Roxey wears pasties with Santa Claus heads on them and is still wearing them while enjoying breakfast with Bill hours, days, or possibly weeks later. Time is pretty fluid in Savage Harbor.
Joe and Anne decide to embark on a lifetime of weird kissing as husband and wife once Joe finishes his next stretch at sea. He and Bill leave at Christmastime and return six months later at Christmastime, but, sadly, while the boys are at sea, Slim and Hank kidnap Anne and return her to Harry, who gets her back on heroin and back to turning tricks. She has a weird surrealist drug nightmare where she's staring into a mirror in the desert. Her bra falls off and her bearded, angry father looks on disapprovingly. The mirror shatters. This is the only intentional surrealism in the film.
A devastated Joe embarks on a quest to find Anne. Bill tries to get him to forget her. "To me, a broad's a broad," he tells his buddy, but we know he's lying because he's fallen for his Santa-pasties Addams Family gal, whether he wants to admit it or not. Joe enlists the reluctant help of sex worker Jenny (Greta Blackburn, probably the best actor of the bunch) who knows where Anne is but is putting her life in danger by giving Joe info, especially because abusive creep Slim is sweet on her. When Harry finds out Joe is after Anne, he sends his boys to put the kibosh on a weird-kisser reunion. Bill gets in on the action after Joe is roughed up by a double team assault. Asses get kicked, people go flying in the wrong direction after getting shot, and lots of weird hell breaks loose. An important character is forgotten and is probably ambiguously dead. The Aristotle book never reappears. Avocados and avocado farms are mentioned several times. A weird sex party is ruined by gunplay. Many incredible death scenes occur. Some unfortunate '80s-style homophobia is trotted out by the heroes and the villains regarding the character of Harold (played by director Carl Monson), a gay hotel desk clerk who provides a pipeline of info to Harry and Slim, though Monson plays him with a lot of spirit and pizzazz, which further proves my theory that the 1980s was simultaneously one of the most homophobic and one of the gayest decades, sometimes in the same package.
Savage Harbor was Monson's first film after a long break from the movie business and his last film ever. He died of heart failure a year later. He made a string of b-movies in the 1970s, beginning with Blood Legacy aka Legacy of Blood aka Will to Die, reviewed on this site in 2018. That movie was about an eccentric family tearing each other apart for their late father's inheritance money. It had less visual oomph and dragged a lot more than Savage Harbor, but it was chock-full of bizarre characters and accidental surrealism, too, particularly in the case of a large foil-wrapped ham that keeps getting taken out and put away by the characters. So much attention is spent on this ham, but I don't think it ever pays off in any way. Hilarious. Monson's other directing credits include the evil bikers vs. sexy babes The Takers, a sexed-up ripoff of/homage to The Little Shop of Horrors called Please Don't Eat My Mother! (IMDb plot description: "a middle-aged man buys a plant with a sexy voice that develops a craving for insects, frogs, dogs, and humans"), G-rated family adventure movie Never Look Back, drag-queen serial killer movie A Scream in the Streets, and some uncredited work on the porno Tarzan parody Tarz and Jane and Cheeta aka Ping Pong (IMDb plot description: "when his penis is bitten off by a crocodile, Tarz turns to the magical powers of the Wango-Wango tribe for help").
Monson did not get along with Mitchum during the shooting of Savage Harbor. The two reportedly had several heated arguments on set, and Monson nailed Mitchum with an incredible zinger after one of them. "You only hired me because of my name," Mitchum yelled. "No, I only hired you because of your father's name," Monson yelled back. I'm not sure if this is an apocryphal tale or it actually happened, but I'm going to keep believing it. Mitchum has had a strange trajectory. Starting out with bit parts in his dad's movies, he moved on to several big-budget Hollywood westerns with John Wayne before getting trapped in the b-movie/exploitation world (a world I wouldn't mind being trapped in) for the remainder of his career. Starting in the '90s, he decided to repeatedly lose local, state, and national elections as a Republican candidate in a heavily Democratic area while taking the occasional acting gig.
Savage Harbor is proof that a movie can be terrible and wonderful at the same time. Stallone and Mitchum just seem to be there, some actors give committed but terrible performances, and some of the cast really deliver the goods, especially Blackburn, but there's an exciting sense that this movie is inventing itself from moment to moment, which a lot of the best and best-worst drive-in/exploitation/b-movies share with art films. That's part of the reason why I love both b-movies and art films and why I don't have a lot of interest in modern big-budget Hollywood stuff, which just feels so dead compared to even a ridiculous piece of nonsense like Savage Harbor. This movie is alive and crackling with energy and inventive weirdness. It's also a piece of shit. But it's also awesome. All these things can be true, and this excites me very much.
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