Say you’re boxer Evander Holyfield and you’re months away from fighting Buster Douglas for the heavyweight championship of the world. How do you prepare for the fight of your life? By producing and making a cameo in a shitty low budget horror flick, of course.
Wheelchair bound teenage beauty queen April (Lori Birdsong) goes up and down the south with her family in their RV participating in beauty pageants. She catches the eye of a seemingly harmless looking tow truck driver named Jake (Danny Nelson) who helps the family when their RV breaks down. Little do they know he’s also in the spare parts business. And we’re not talking auto parts. We’re talking body parts as he keeps half dead people locked in his shed and sells off their organs on the black market to a seedy doctor (Ray Walston).
Blood Salvage is a turgid mix of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (killer redneck family), Eaten Alive (the family keeps a gator on the premises), and Motel Hell (the half dead victims wailing). If it was just crude and dumb it would be one thing but the constant scenes of a paraplegic in peril are often tasteless and the scene where the killers suck out a little boy’s spinal fluid is borderline reprehensible. Even more offensive is the fact that it clocks in at a whopping ninety-eight minutes, which is about twenty minutes longer than it had any right being.
If you’re curious to see it just for the participation of Holyfield, you might be disappointed. He’s only in one scene near the beginning as a carnie boxer. It has no bearing on the story whatsoever and his appearance was probably little more than a perk for being a producer. John Saxon also appears as the beauty queen’s father but he’s more or less wasted and gets sidelined for much of the movie once he gets captured. Walston looks like he’d rather be someplace else. Despite the progressive notion of having its main character be a handicapped beauty queen, our heroine is more annoying than sympathetic as her constant whining quickly becomes grating.
In short, Blood Salvage belongs on the scrap pile.
you're dead wrong about this film, I found it pretty thrilling and interesting and not "tasteless" or "reprehensible" in the least and the main character isn't annoying at all.
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