Use of Tropes: Savage Love

Savage Love is an Olaf Ittenbach film from 2012, and I went in expecting the usual Ittenbach gore but it felt a tad gore-lite. I was watching the German Blu-Ray and, it turns out, 5 minutes of gore has been removed from the film’s domestic release (I’ll link the, apparently, uncut version below). International releases are therefore going to be more splatter than what I saw. Whilst technically not a vampire film it certainly did play around with tropes, not least because it seems directly inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn.

held by the mob

The film starts, however, in the middle ages and a witch, Linda (Sarita Bradley), is pulled through the forest by a knight (Andreas Pape) leading a mob. He demands something off her and she refuses, so he kills her but not before she’s spoken with an effect on her voice and cast a curse. Creatures (likely demons) appear and kill the knights and mob – she reappears glowing. Just a note about her name, she is listed as Lady Nadja on IMDb – this may be her modern-day persona and I missed the name change but she is definitely referred to as Linda in the subtitles for the opening section.

Marc and Lukas

The film proper follows two guys – hitmen, apparently – called Lukas (Philippe Jacq) and Marc (Dustin Semmelrogge, Montrak). They have scored tickets to a swinger event in, what appears to be, a brothel. The film grounds itself in pretty low-brow humour with plenty of drug references and misogynistic humour until Hell breaks loose.

Sarita Bradley as Linda

This is started by Linda preparing drinks for the ladies present by dripping her blood into champagne. This subsequently turns them into demons – though to be fair the monster type might be interchangeable between demons, vampires and zombies. However, it is important to note that they are specifically turned due to ingesting blood and this feels like a vampire trope, of course. It turns out that Linda is no ordinary witch – rather she is the actual daughter of the devil.

demons

So the plot is that she is seeking the blood of 666 victims (with Judeo-Christian names) to summon her father to earth. This might sound like satanic sacrifice except for the throwaway line that she needs to drink the blood – and brings us back to vampire genre tropes. The men fight back due to a priest there (who had spent his time looking like Andrew Eldritch up to the demons appearing) who is carrying oodles of weapons. He has also trapped many of the demons outside by sealing a perimeter with holy water (they were out attacking a teen party in the woods).

ready to rumble

This siege feels like the aforementioned From Dusk Till Dawn – though in this Lukas and Marc are able to go outside and stand calmly before the horde, with the holy water barrier between them, and start shooting them. Bullets do seem an effective countermeasure. There isn’t much more to say about the plot – it is simplistic and, in many respects, derivative – and I’ve covered off the tropes used (back from the dead, turning through blood, holy water apotropaic, aiming to drink victim’s blood and a general lift and shift of plot points out of From Dusk Till Dawn). It is, with these, of genre interest.

The imdb page is here.

Cut version on Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

Uncut on Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK