Snuff [DVD] [1976] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Like many films that appeared in the early 70s and raised a stink for one reason or another - the publicity surrounding the Findlay's film Snuff is more interesting than the film itself. In fact, this film - which supposedly depicted the actual dismembering of a young girl - caused such a fuss when it played in New York that the mayor demanded that the perpetrators be captured and prosecuted. That is, of course, until the producers admitted that the film was a fraud and produced the dead actress for all to see. The thing is, Snuff films have always been the stuff of urban legends - and still are (that's probably a good thing). Clearly a reaction to the urban legend, this film is nothing more than a late 60s Hell's Angelsish biker movie with a tacked on ending in which the film's director disembowels a young blond girl. Not sexual, and hardly interesting - the snuff bit of the film is hardly impressive as far as either shock or special effects. Of course, you have to sit through a turgid tale of bikers and drug smuggling to even get to this bit - and it just isn't worth it. Maybe a movie to have in your collection as a conversation piece - but then you run the risk of a friend wanting to watch it, and you won't want to.

SNUFF - The legendary 1977 grindhouse favorite! Remember that great marketing campaign? - "The movie they said no producer could make, no distributor would release, and no audience could stomach. This is the one and only original legendary atrocity shot by Monarch Films in South America and New York, where human life is cheap! The mystery and controversy surrounding this vicious and violent venture remains clouded to this day. Many of the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again. SNUFF is the film that went too far - it contains scenes of sadism, bondage, bloodshed and mutilation too real to be simulated, too shocking to be ignored. Are the killings in this film real? You be the judge!" Hahhahahahahhaha!
This classic 42nd Street favorite is anything but real (at least in my opinion - you be "the judge"), but whatever you decide, there is no denying that it is an HILARIOUSLY campy, ridiculously-dubbed south-of-the-border exploitation flick! If you don't know it's history, the producers had bought a bad, sleazy 1971 Argentinian revenge flick called "The Slaughter", cut off the ending, added a terribly fake newly shot unrelated "snuff" sequence at the end instead, changed the title to "Snuff" and released it to unsuspecting crowds in 1977. I'm sure it caused a few riots at the time. Is there any snuff in it? No. Is it even about snuff? No. But who cares, it's all in the marketing, right?
This hilariously marketed "limited edition" disc from Blue Underground is as bare-bones as you can get. The keepcase is a replica of a crinkled paper bag. No mention of actors, cast, crew or Blue Underground. Just a UPC code and the limited edition # printed on the back. Insert the disc and the movie starts playing automatically - there's no menu screen at all and the movie is not divided into any chapter stops. Full frame presentation looks and sounds OK overall. Don't think there was much "remastering" done, but it's probably as good as it's ever going to look. There's also no mention of Blue Underground on the disc itself and no insert card. Makes you feel like you're really getting something "taboo" from the underground (blue?). Of course, once the movie actually starts and you hear the atrocious dubbing and see the ridiculous action, all that scary reality is blown out the window. This is anything but real.
Since there are no extras and the movie itself seems to alienate most horror fans looking for gore or horrific thrills, this disc is really only for diehard exploitation fans especially considering it's high retail price. Life is cheap but this DVD ain't.

"Snuff" is a film that "those in the know" regarding early seventies exploitation and horror should see at least once. Its main claim to fame was that it was nothing more than a cheap Manson cash-in that was found to be unreleasable. This prompted an enterprising producer to insert a graphically violent ending and then claiming that it displayed an actual murder. Of course, this was proven to be false but the publicity regarding this scene brought much noteriety to the film. The main problem with the DVD is the lack of any extras as it tries to replicate the original viewing experience. The package resembles a brown paper bag with only the title and tag-line displayed, there is no insert card and no information on what the film is about. There is no menu and the movie just starts and after the ending scene simply loops to start again. This is unfortunate as, if one film required a "special edition", this one is it. Why there was not a commentry track illustrating the various trials and tribulations the film went through is beyond me. Seriously, the film itself sucks but the history behind it is amazing. It is too bad that an opportunity to really make a bad film worthwhile with the addition of extras has been lost.

When sitting down to review this film I was torn between whether it deserved one or five stars. I had known about "Snuff" for quite some time and was very excited when I found that it was availble on DVD. I originally read a great deal about the subject matter for a paper I did on horror movies reflecting cultural fears for a film class, but never got around seeing the film (it was not readily available at the time). This movie is so bad that it truly is a work of art.

"Snuff" was filmed in Argentina (apparently originally to be titled either "El Angel de la muerte" or "American Cannibale") in 1971 or 1972 with out sound and dubbed in America. The premise of this film is loosely based on the Manson murders, although the Manson character named Sataan looked more like a 70's teen hearthrob (like Bobby Sherman) with 5 o'clock shadow. There are plenty of attractive 70's women including a "Sharon Tate" type character who looks like a cross between Jane Birkin and Astrud Gilberto. Everything about this movie is truly wretched, with the exception the music which is in much the style of the Velvet Underground, Brainticket, Amon Duul II and Can playing sort of a "Born to be Wild" themed jam. The dialogue is quite humorous including the leading lady's excellent line, "Please forgive me of my ignorance, but I am facinated by it..." when speaking to her supposidely German (he looked latin, although you would think they could find some Germans somewhere in Argentina) lover's father about his weapon manufacturing business.

The original director (A.Bochin?!?) realized this film was too lousy to release, scraping it before it was complete, sitting on the shelf until 1976 when Michael Findlay added the "snuff" ending to it. Apparently this ending garnered the movie serious attention, although most of it started with a publicity stunt including fake police investigations, fake banning and "plants" in the audience to feign horror, fainting and sickness over the subject matter. In fact more was put into the overall publicity of this film, than in to film itself. It was truly a Warholian event.

The amusing thing about the movie is some people thought it was real. I have yet to see Tempura paint that actually looks like blood, although the reason for using orange-red Tempura in this film is beyond me. In some of the murder scenes, you can actually see the blood on the clothes before the stabbing takes place!! The attached "snuff" ending looks nothing like the original film. The original movie, as I mentioned was filmed in 1972 and the added bit at the end was filmed in 1975 or 1976 with no attempt to get an actress who looked anything like any of the actresses in the original movie or keep in mind that styles had changed in three years time. Also the apparent "snuffing" of the actress is absurdly fake, including cutting fingers off with a pair of wire cutters and cutting a whole hand off with a jigsaw (and these are clean cuts too!!!!). Those are pretty impressive wire cutters and a mean jigsaw if they can cut cleanly through skin, muscle and bone.

This movie has to be seen to be believed.

Have you ever seen a film so bad, so cosmically awful in every single one of its gutter level, rotten attributes that you gaze in open mouthed awe at the idiocy of it all? I have, and I'm going to tell you all about it right now. It's called "House of the Dead"...oh, sorry; I'll be writing that review later tonight. I meant to say that the film in question is Roberta and Michael Findlay's 1970's dud "Snuff." Actually, the finished product we see here on this DVD isn't solely the fault of the aforementioned couple. Apparently, some yutz picked up the rights to the film five years after Roberta and Michael made it in Argentina. That's right--most of this film takes place in South America. After watching this atrocity the stupidity of the invasion of the Falkland Islands a few years later makes more sense. Anyway, this huckster shot a couple of cheesy H.G. Lewis quality gore scenes, inserted them at pertinent (yeah right) places in the film, and unleashed it on an unassuming public by advertising it as a real life snuff movie. How many people went to see this crud based on the advertising campaign is unclear to this day, probably because no one wants to admit their crime. The statute of limitations on willingly seeing bad films hasn't run out yet, either.

"Snuff," which we should call "Jigsaw" since that's what the film resembles, begins with a completely nonsensical scene before breaking down into complete anarchy. We see a couple of young ladies zipping down the road on a motorcycle as some generic rock music--although it resembles Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" in some respects--plays in the background. These girls, the names of whom I couldn't remember at gunpoint, eventually chase down another woman named Ana. It turns out that Ana is the procurer of narcotics for a cult run by the wily Satan (that's Satan pronounced so that it rhymes with Rattan), and she tried to pull a fast one on the group. After an amazingly lame chase sequence, Ana ends up lying on the ground with her feet in stocks. One of her "sisters" takes a knife and twists it around between Ana's toes. Ouch! It's always better to pay for a professional pedicure rather than let an amateur do it for free. Anyway, these scenes take up only a small part of the film. Once they let Ana go, the film downshifts into an insipid plot involving a film actress named Terry, a film director called Max, and her lover Horst. Believe it or not, there is a connection between Satan and Terry. It's unfortunate in the extreme that we couldn't just wrap the whole thing up in the first five minutes before the pain of watching "Snuff" increased to intolerable levels.

Horst seems to live at home with his arms dealer father, a man so grating to the senses that I couldn't feel my appendages two seconds after seeing him. He shouts, he bullies, he argues with anyone within earshot. Why? Don't ask me. What we do know is that Horst has a thing going on with Angelica, a woman who just happens to be a spy in the employ of Satan. Of course, Terry doesn't know about this covert relationship at first. She's too busy listening to Max talk up the latest movie deal, a deal that will eventually fall through. At some point in the "narrative" Terry goes to a Carnival type street festival and sits there for what feels like hours with Max. The movie, in an effort to transcend its five peso budget, loads up the screen with tons of stock footage of South American Carnival type street festival footage. It's strange: we see a close up of Terry and Max that is obviously shot against the side of a building somewhere, then see the film cut away to incredibly grainy stock footage. It's so obvious the two events have no connection that one wonders why the filmmakers even bothered. Let's skip to the end, eh? Satan's female cult members rob a store, Angelica tells a story about her abusive childhood and the demise of her father, and the cult embarks on a Manson Family style spree at Horst's father's house. The end.

Sorry about the rather jumbled summary, but would you believe I did that with the help of notes? Yep, I took notes on this movie and STILL can't fashion a coherent synopsis. The film simply makes no sense. Random scenes, like a cult member stabbing some guy in a bathroom at an airport, stand as sequences entirely independent from the rest of the film. For that matter, the whole Carnival scene makes little sense. I think it is painfully obvious why it appears in the movie, though. Using stock footage achieves two important goals for the micro budget filmmaker: it's cheaper than shooting your own stuff, and it helps to pad the run time. As for the big "scene" at the end of the film, the scene hyped as real snuff footage, it isn't anything a self-respecting gorehound will write home about. Like I said earlier, you've seen what happens in the scene before if you've ever experienced any of Herschell Gordon Lewis's gore films. In other words, the effects do achieve a certain level of yuckiness even as they look extraordinarily cheap.

I feel sorry for anyone subjected to "Snuff." Heck, I feel sorry for the technicians who had to go through the footage for hundreds of hours during the DVD transfer process. I'm seriously (very seriously) considering elevating this film to the top of my worst films ever list. It's even worse than "Manos: The Hands of Fate," which at least was so bad that it entertained on a certain level. There is nothing remotely entertaining about "Snuff." It's eighty minutes of excruciating agony that even my worst enemy shouldn't have to watch.