As Avi Nesher’s films go, Savage unfortunately falls down somewhere in She territory. It is not quite the same mind-boggling, compulsively-bad experience that She was, but definitely comes close at times. Savage is certainly a bizarre experience, as much for one not only having no idea where it is going, as not even what type of film it is trying to be, from one moment to the next. The film starts out seeming like it is going to be a typical action movie revenge scenario with gunmen killing Olivier Gruner’s family, he going into catatonic silence in an asylum and then breaking out. It is then that the film starts to get weird as Gruner returns to his ranch and we see his progressive reversion to barbarism. A few minutes later, glowing aliens appear out of primitive cave paintings on the wall and use their super-science to enhance Gruner’s simian ancestry and turn him into a Neanderthal superman.

The film then flips to a standard Cyberpunk future (on the cheap) where Olivier Gruner becomes hunted by a sinister corporation that produces virtual videogames. At this point, why the corporation is hunting him and what they are trying to get from the aliens becomes a headscratching puzzle trying to follow. It involves something to do with the fact that the aliens somehow discovered the secrets of immortality and managed to relocate themselves in cyberspace – wherein the film seems to treat cyberspace as though it were an actual place rather than the metaphor formed out of several computers linked by telephone line. Gruner seems to get clues as to what is happening from a videogame (the audience is not so lucky). It all ends on a climax that has been filched from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) with the ancient alien artefact being opened. Making any sense out of this is a genuine challenge. It is certainly one of the most conceptually whacked out films one has seen in some time.

The script comes from regular Nesher co-writer Patrick Highsmith, who is possibly a pseudonym for Nesher himself (it is also the name of the fictional screenwriter in Doppelganger). As usual, Highsmith names his characters after popular artists in a particular genre – in The Outsider, for example, it was film noir actors. Here Highsmith has named all the characters after adventure or thriller writers. Thus we have characters named Nick(y) Carter, Marie Belloc, Lester Dent, Eric Rohmer, Mickey Spillane, Edgar Wallace, a Reece Burroughs (after Edgar Rice Burroughs) and a Julie [Jules] Verne.