Snuff
Stomp
Visual
R4
DVD
Snuff films are the things of legend.
While researchers have spent inordinate amounts of time looking for the real thing,
films where actors are actually killed on camera, they have never found them.
The answer many argue is because real torture and death is not as dramatic and
as blood curdling as what can be achieved on film with even a modicum of
special effects. Even famous shockumentaries such as
the Mondo Cane series,
This film, Snuff, has an amazing history.
It was originally produced in 1971 by two exploitation filmmakers, Michael and
Roberta Findlay, to play off the Mansion murders of the previous year. It was
filmed in
Cut to five years later and the media is
abuzz with rumors of real Snuff films. Nobody finds any, but the news is
screaming, the puritans are whining and the journalists are sniffing for blood.
So a very astute film distributor Allan Shackleton
decides to create a film he can market as the real thing. He takes Slaughter,
renames it Snuff and adds in extra footage to expand its gore quotient and to
support his contention that it is a “real” Snuff film. According to various
film historians he even hires protestors to picket the film.
He markets it in a plain cover with no
credits and the anonymity of the packaging and the rumor mill he creates as a
marketing tool does the trick, he makes a packet. (Never mind he gets sued by
Michael and Roberta Findlay along the way !).
Snuff was originally banned by the
Australian censors in the early eighties, but has been released uncut in 2005.
This is not a classic,
it is badly acted, has little to no plot, and has been edited and re-edited for
various purposes so the result is an absolute appalling mess. However much of a
failure Snuff is as a film, it has an important place in the history of
exploitation cinema and it is nice to have a good edition available for home
viewing.
Marketed in a fake brown paper cover with
the sub title “ the film that could only be made in