| Product: |
Snuff (DVD) |
| Date: |
07/12/06 (379 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: The music is quite good
Disadvantages: Otherwise the film is abominable
This is a review of just the film.
This might be the single most worthless film I’ve ever seen. It fails to do any of the things I assume it’s trying to do. But it does have some historical interest, kind of. Although it didn’t exactly start the urban myth that snuff movies (films where people are really murdered on film) exist, it certainly helped to popularise it.
The bulk of this film was made in 1971 under the name Slaughter by the husband and wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay. Slaughter, made in South America for very little money, and probably never finished, sat on the shelf for a number of years. It was taken up by an exploitation distributor named Allan Shackleton. He released it in 1976 under the name Snuff, with a tacked on bad taste ending that gave rise to the film’s notoriety. He implied that it was the real deal – a film that depicted the actual, honest-to-goodness murder of a young woman on screen. This (honestly!) is the film’s one and only selling point – it’s meant to be a real snuff movie.
So the film has acquired a place in the annals of horror film history, largely because of its marketing campaign (which stirred up a whole lotta controversy back in the gullible 70s). Predictably enough, it found itself on the video nasties list in the UK in the 80s, just adding to its desirability. (I’m not sure if it’s been released uncut on these shores even now.)
So there are two elements to this. The film, which is meant to be fiction, and the film-within-a-film ending, which is meant to be real, but very obviously isn’t. (Cannibal Holocaust, a much better made and genuinely unpleasant video nasty uses much the same technique). The film (that is, the main film, the one that was originally called Slaughter – everyone still with me? Splendid.) is a disjointed tale of a Satanic hippie cult that gets its jollies by doing the usual Satanic hippie stuff – killing harmless old folks, sacrificing babies, taking drugs, lesbian kissing. You know the routine. It was obviously intended as a cash-in on the notoriety of the Manson killings. You’d think it would be difficult to go too far wrong with material like that. Heck, give me a camera, a few topless chicks and some toy knives and I’ll bet I could make a pretty serviceable killer-hippie-cult film. Tragically, I wasn’t around when the film was being made – and nor was anyone with any talent.
There are so many problems it’s difficult to know where to start. But let’s begin with the acting. You won’t have seen any of the actors in anything else, and there’s a very good reason for that. They deliver an astonishing masterclass in bad acting. The voices are all overdubbed (very badly) – I assume the cast was all Argentinean. The voice acting is also appalling, especially the male characters. And for goodness sake: if you’re going skinny dipping with three pretty ladies, at least try to look interested!
The plot makes virtually no sense at all. In addition to the hippies, we follow the fortunes of an American movie star who the cult has set its sights on. The two plot strands are both pretty incomprehensible, with things happening with no explanation whatsoever and important plot points seemingly missing. Even with some of the clunkiest expository dialogue I’ve ever heard (“Well, I’m back. Ten days earlier than expected.”) I still had no idea what was going on. Who, for instance, was the man knifed to death in the airport bathroom? Why do the police conduct their murder investigation from a desk placed outside what looks like a barn?
The problems extend to the direction. There’s no sense of urgency about anything, no sense of place, endless padding. The director all too often falls back on that crutch of the bad film-maker, the zoom lens. Please. It’s not big, and it’s not clever – just ask anyone who’s ever tried to sit through a Jess Franco movie. The editing is all over the place. The gore effects, such as they are, are lousy. The violence and sex scenes are utterly uninvolving. It’s as if every scene, every action, every line of dialogue exists in a vacuum – nothing feels like it has any relation to anything else we’re seeing. It’s like someone assembled all the individual elements that might go to make up a film and threw them down in roughly the right order, but without bothering to stick them together.
It has precisely two things in its favour. The soundtrack is quite fun – lots of bongos and a half-decent Steppenwolf pastiche. And there’s a really weird moment when some of the characters, apropos of nothing, start to discuss the political situation in the Middle East. This isn’t good, but it’s incongruous enough to be funny; the sudden crash-zoom into one actor’s face as he practically bellows the word “Eichmann!” had me giggling for quite a long time.
Of course, the whole point of the film isn’t the film itself, it’s the extra little bit they’ve stuck on the end. The main feature doesn’t even end properly (most likely because they ran out of money before they could finish it). But after the tiresome hippie antics have run their course, we get the alleged snuff movie. Some members of the film crew (supposedly the ones filming the film we’ve just watched – god, it’s difficult to describe this in any kind of coherent way) murder a young blonde. The footage, of course, is totally unconvincing – this is very obviously not a snuff movie on any level. The special effects are terrible – no one can have been fooled for more than about ten seconds (blood just doesn’t *look* like that). But for all that, it’s still a fairly slimy moment of misogynistic exploitation that makes me vaguely ashamed to have seen the film at all.
So anyway, there you have it. A really appalling film, one that I don’t recommend you see at all. It’s a great example of the triumph of marketing. It’s also probably unique, in that I can’t think of another film that does quite what it does: makes the audience sit through a cheap bit of rubbish exploitation to get to an even cheaper, equally rubbish bit of exploitation. This film only exists for its last five minutes, which bear no relation at all to the previous 75 minutes. It’s the kind of film you could probably write post-modern theses about, although I suspect most academics would rather not bother.
You can get this on DVD in America. I think a cut version may have been released here at some point, and obviously you could try to get hold of one of the old VHS copies. But really, don’t bother. Every time I think I’ve stumbled across the worst film ever, I find an even worse one. But, at least this week, this is the worst film ever. Avoid it.
Summary: A rather notorious but entirely bad video nasty
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