Rare Flix: Snuff

Few movies are so famous for so little. All the hype around this movie involves the ending sequence, which was supposedly so real that people thought it was real. Or did they? The mix of real hype and manufactured hype is very blurry here. This film is famous for a fake public outrage over the film's content set up by the producers to get ticket sales. Just like the August outrage over Health Care, people were fooled by this and bought into what the people were selling. But what is the reality? Is this movie good or just a nothing film? Find out in my review of...

Snuff

The film is about a young starlet going over to Argentina to make a movie. We are told this through stock flying footage, stock location footage and badly-overdubbed dialogue. This is not a good start. Her manager wants her to meet up with a producer upon arrival, but she complains about being tired. Moments later, she gets a call from her secret lover who just happens to be in the country at the time. Giant plot leaps of logic this early- not good. We also get the scene oddly shot as it cuts and then focuses on a woman walking around the pool, all the while as the guy keeps talking. Oh, apparently she is also there and they just did not feel like showing the guy talking. He drives his boat over and they go back to his place to have sex. They don't really show you much of it, which is what you would expect from a film like this. Meanwhile, we need to focus on the other part of our plot- the bad guys. We get a woman being abused by her three companions at a farm for not bring enough drugs. Their leader is a Manson-wannabe named Satann, who only stops the torture when it would seriously maim her. Oddly, this lady still wants to be part of the group.

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The movie is in a constant battle as to which bad story they want to tell. On one hand, they want to cover the salacious stuff with the cult. For example, Satann and one of the woman stand around in a lake topless. The other women show up and join them, but they don't show what you think they will. A late scene has the new girl being 'initiated' by the leader's...uh, member, as the other girls watch. Here is the thing: they pretty much just show the faces of the woman in a bad 'day as night' shot (see Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter). You don't really see enough to know what is happening if they had not done the setup to it so overtly. Meanwhile, they try to show us the woman hanging around Argentina, but never actually filming a movie. We see her at the pool, in Carnivale (via boat-loads of stock footage) and meeting with her boy-toy's dad. Very late, our stories meet up as the Cult seemingly-exits the weird alternated dimension they were in (it was clearly not Argentina!) and joins the plot. The new recruit kills the producer and, later on, Satann argues with the man's dad over selling guns. When the crazed cult murderer is against you, what does that say? It all ends with a badly-framed scene of the people breaking in and about to stab our pregnant, brunette heroine...

*

...or does it? The real famous scene starts here as the last scene 'cuts' and we see a set that does not match the bedroom. The now-blond actress goes to leave, but the director wants to do one more scene. He gets the grips to hold her down (ha ha- irony) as he proceeds to brutalize her. He cuts off some of her prop fingers and cuts her open, pulling out some sausage links as he concludes. He asks if they got the scene and then the movie cuts Holy Grail-style. I waited 80 boring minutes for this?

*

Yeah, this movie sucks real bad. The film is slow-paced, erratically-focused and just dull. The movie cannot decide whether it is about our starlet doing nothing or about our cult occasionally doing something (i.e. the store robbery scene). To top it all off, the acting is bad and the film is dubbed in the most incompetent way. The film constantly finds way to not showing you the actors talking (i.e. holding phones at awkward angles to block their mouths) to try and cover up this error. This explains the weird pool scene that I mentioned earlier. The DVD comes on a blank disk with a sticker label designed to look it was drawn on with a marker. This is all part of a motif designed to make you think that this is a film that is unofficial. The only problem- the movie has a title screen! Do real snuff films take the time to make titles for their films that only they are supposed to see? This movie is not worth its hype or worth your time. You can safely skip this movie and keep your film movie 'cred.'

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More Blockbuster Trash on the way, this time coming to us from Britain. Can they class this segment up? It's a faux Kung-fu movie, so no. Stay tuned...