Savage Vows is a shot-on-video slasher film from 1995.

It tells the story of what happens when Mark (Armand Sposto) loses his wife in a car accident and six of his friends decide to spend the weekend with him.  Some of his friends sincerely want to help him.  Some of his friends just want to hang out for the weekend and a funeral is as good an excuse as any to do so.  Some of his friends are wondering how much money Mark is going to get from the insurance company and whether or not he might be willing to give them some of that money.  To be honest, they’re not the most likable group of friends.

For his part, Mark just wants to sit on the couch and spend the entire weekend watching movies.  In one of the few scenes in the film that doesn’t take place in Mark’s house, everyone heads down to the local, indie video store.  Mark rents the Lion King.  His friends insist on renting a bunch of horror films in order to keep Mark from being corrupted by a Disney cartoon.  I mean, Mark may be in mourning and he may have just lost his wife and he might be very generously allowing everyone to stay in his rather small house but that doesn’t mean that he just gets to rent whatever movie he wants to rent!  He’s got friends to think about!

Anyway, Mark is so depressed and he spends so much time either watching movies or running blindly through his neighborhood that he doesn’t even notice that there’s a black-gloved killer murdering his friends.  Who could the killer be?  The natural suspect would seem to be the redneck neighbor who keeps talking about how he’s a sign of the apocalypse but then that neighbor gets killed down at the cemetery so I guess it wasn’t him.  The identity of the killer is eventually revealed but don’t ask me to explain what exactly was motivating this particular person to kill.  I assume that an explanation was given but, for me to have heard it, this film would have had to have done a much better job of holding my attention.  I’ve only got a three-minute attention span.

I was going to be even snarkier than I’m currently being when it came to describing this film but, to be honest, it feels a bit churlish to be too critical of a film that was obviously made over a weekend by a group of friends who had access to a video camera.  This was a direct-to-video film that was shot in someone’s house with a semi-amateur cast and an obvious eye towards selling it in the type of video store that shows up in the movie.  That doesn’t make Savage Vows any sort of secret masterpiece or anything like that.  To be honest, it’s a pretty inept film and it barely even qualifies as a work of outsider art.  But, in the end, you have to admire the fact that the film not only got made but, nearly 30 years later, it can still be viewed on sites like Tubi.  Good for the people who made this film!

That said, Savage Vows still sucks.