User Reviews

One of the more obscure pictures produced in The Philippines by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, Savage! (or Black Valor, if you're more familiar with the Bingo Home Video release) stars James Inglehart as the titular gun for hire. As the box art informs us, he's 'the toughest, baddest, bravest dude ever to hit the jungle!', and he's certainly the most taciturn. Hired by leering rotter Vic Diaz to help tamp down a righteous local rebellion, Savage switches sides after witnessing the savage rape of a witness and offers his valuable advise to the People's Liberation Army. Inglehart was quite memorable in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but director Cirio Santiago doesn't get much of an effort from him here. Dolly bird Carol Speed seems to be having fun though, and Diaz is, as always, great fun. Don Julian's score is suitably funky, though it's a shame The Meadowlarks couldn't contribute.

Savage (Iglehart) is a military man currently in the Philippines. His original mission was to capture the leader of a revolutionary rebel army that's trying to brew an insurrection in the country. When things go wrong, as they often do, Savage goes on the run. Thankfully, before that happens, he meets two female circus performers who team up with him. Vicki (Edmund Jr.) is a knife-thrower, and Amanda (Speed) is a high-wire artist. The three come to realize that what the rebels are fighting for is a worthy cause, so they join up. That's lucky for the rebels, as Savage probably knows more about gun-shooting and hut-exploding than anyone else in the country. And it wouldn't be a Philippines-set/Cirio movie without the presence of Vic Diaz. Will Savage and his fellow rebels come out on top? Or will retaliation be SAVAGE? While most people know this movie as Savage! (don't forget the exclamation point), if they know the movie at all, we saw it as Black Valor, the VHS release on Scimitar/Bingo Video. It is in EP mode and the quality is poor. The colors are so washed out, you can't even read the credits. Of course, there is a highly-obvious superimposed video title where the original title was supposed to be. And the models on the cover are not in the movie. It's puzzling why they thought they had to do all that, as the Blaxploitation craze was long over by the 80's VHS release, and Savage! is a perfectly fine and saleable title. But such was the video store era. You never know what you're going to discover.

As for the movie itself, it's probably one of Cirio's weakest. Thankfully, it's only 80 minutes, but it feels longer. You'd really think Savage's travails in the jungle, which include plenty of gun-shooting, exploding huts, punch-ups (and even a few seconds of racquetball) would be enough to carry the movie, but there are many slow moments and the whole outing has a lack of urgency. It could have used more intensity, or - and this may be asking a bit much - character development. But that being said, there is some interesting camera-work at times, the Don Julian score is extremely funky and excellent, far better than the movie deserves, and the presences of Edmund Jr. (Can a woman be a Jr.?) and Speed liven things up. It would have been a total jungle slog without them.

Probably the most interesting idea (perhaps the only actual idea) in Black Valor is the fact that the two circus girls (who, let's face it, work for the lowest budget circus of all time) use their circus skills to kill baddies. The knife thrower - who usually throws knives around a nervous participant, now uses her accuracy to throw them into the chests and stomachs of the goons around her. And the trapeze girl uses her agility to flip around stuff and kick bad guys. There's even a Gymkata-esque moment where she - while outside during a chase, mind you - somehow finds what are essentially parallel bars that just happen to be there, so she can hang on and kick people from them. So that was enjoyable, but there should have been more of it. It's almost enough of an idea to support a movie on its own. Also different was, instead of the Prerequisite Torture of the hero, there was the Prerequisite Torture of one of the circus ladies. You'd think it would have been Iglehart. But no.

In the end, Savage! AKA Black Valor is a pretty standard jungle/El Presidente outing. It just doesn't have that magical "It" factor - it's really just another movie that you see once and then it sits on a shelf

Far from a good movie and definitely nowhere near very realistic, this action film with a multi-cultural cast is still entertaining even though the viewer's basically screaming, "Yeah right" at a lot of things going on. It's cheap both in budget and in spirit, with plenty of bare female breasts and exploitation, showing some pretty vivid rapes and one sexual act that only shows the reaction of the male involved, played for laughs but pretty sick. James Iglehart is an American so deep in the middle of nowhere that it doesn't even have a name. His antics leads him into becoming involved in the revolution along with two female American entertainers, Lada Edmund and Carol Speed.

The acting isn't the best, and the script often moronic and juvenile, but as a piece of silly 70's cinema, its audaciousness is delicious, unapologetic for knowingly sending up how bad it knows it is. You have to leave all sense of artistic integrity behind to get through it. There are some pretty locations, allegedly filmed in the Phillipines, so at least visually it has some pleasures. There were three movies with the title "Savage" made in 1973 so if you make the mistake of getting this one thinking it's one of the other two, give it a chance. Relatively short so not painful to get through.

Between 1973 and 2008, Cirio H. Santiago partnered with Roger Corman on more than forty Philippines-filmed exploitation movies. The cost was low, the stuntmen willing to die, the locations gorgeous. And here's Savage!, directed by Santiago and written by one time only screenwriter Ed Medard.

Savage (James Iglehart, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) goes from a criminal evading the law to a leader overthrowing a dictatorship in just over eighty minutes. Working with Vicki (Lada St. Edmund, who went from go-go dancer on Hullabaloo to being the highest paid stunt woman in Hollywood) and Amanda (Carol Speed, always Abby), he goes from fighting the rebels to becoming one of them. I mean, Vicki is a knife thrower and Amanda is an acrobat and they know how to transform those circus skills into deadly arts.

As you can imagine, Vic Diaz is in this and maybe bamboo buildings blow up real good. It's also called Black Valor, which really isn't a better title than Savage! But is possibly a better blacksploitation movie name.

Iglehart is also in a much better film in this same genre, Fighting Mad. Aura Aurea, who plays China, was known as the Brigitte Bardot of the Philippines, which is a great name to be awarded, right?