As I was
watching Salvage – a movie that could easily have been tag-lined: Something
Virulent This Way Comes! – I was reminded of a 4-part TV mini-series I watched
in 1981: The Nightmare Man.
By age 13, I had
long grown out of my ‘Dr. Who’ stage, and The Nightmare Man kept me gripped.
After seeing the TV show, I read the re-issued novel, originally titled: Child
Of Vodyanoi, by David Wiltshire.
Salvage has
some similar themes to The Nightmare Man: a military secret, soldiers
struggling to wipe out that which is prowling and killing indiscriminately,
with the locals fearing if they are dealing with either a psychopath or a savage
creature. Salvage was filmed on the same Merseyside TV set as the old and now cancelled
British TV soap: Brookside. The plot is simple: a container found on a beach during
Christmas Eve makes the news due to dead bodies also discovered at the scene.
Soon the inhabitants of a cul-de-sac are contained in their homes by a team of
soldiers ready to shoot anything they see moving. Among the chaos, a troubled
mother fights to save her estranged daughter who is trapped in a nearby house. Can
she get to her daughter without falling victim to either a soldier’s bullet, or
the deadly ‘something’ that is stalking the area … which, disappointingly just
turns out to be a guy with a gunky face!
A pity about Salvage;
I wanted to like it. It was okay compared with so many other low-budget movies,
but it ultimately lacked the way so many smaller-scale movies do: poor script,
insufficient budget, some incoherent dialogue, and, despite the running around,
a lot of screaming, and large helpings of blood and gore – there is a distinct
lack of suspense. The actors (notably Neve McIntosh) do the best they can with
the material they have, which sadly isn’t enough to lift the movie above
mediocre. What could have been a welcome addition to the Dawn of the Dead / 28
Days Later genre finally came across as a bargain-basement offering that failed
to deliver.
