Snuff (1976) – Blu-ray Disc


Snuff1click
any image to enlarge

*½/****
Image B+
Sound C+
Extras B+

starring
Liliana Fernández Blanco, Ana
Carro, Enrique Larratelli, Mirtha Massa

written
and directed by Michael Findlay (with
additional footage directed by Simon Nuchtern)

by
Bryant Frazer
For the majority of
its running time, Snuff is pretty standard
grindhouse fare. Shot on the
cheap and loosely based on the Manson cult murders, which were still
big news
when the film was being shot in 1971, it's a potboiler about a
serial-killing
biker gang of women in thrall to a presumably charismatic, self-styled
guru
calling himself Satán. Shootings, stabbings, softcore groping, and
general
toplessness ensue. But it's not your ordinary South American Satanic
nudie cult
film à clef. Among dime-a-dozen exploitation films, Snuff
is special.

RUNNING TIME
80 minutes
MPAA
X
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.67:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 1.0 DTS-HD MA
SUBTITLES
English
REGION
All
DISC
TYPE

BD-25
STUDIO
Blue Underground

Snuff is one of those movies that's
famous for the circus
surrounding its release, rather than any intrinsic cinematic qualities.
The
story of Snuff is the strange story of commerce
and gullibility writ
large on the silver screen. The film that would become Snuff
was
originally titled The Slaughter.1
It was shot in Argentina by budget-conscious
husband-and-wife sex-movie mavens Michael and Roberta Findlay, who had
built a
reputation on some roughies they made in the 1960s, including Satan's
Bed

(with a pre-Beatles Yoko Ono), Take Me Naked, and
the …of Her Flesh
trilogy. Measured by those yardsticks, Slaughter
was actually a fairly
ordinary attempt to capitalize on Manson mania, dramatizing the
horrifying
Charles Manson family murders in largely inept fashion. Like the
earlier
sexploitation flicks, it may be artless, but it's not completely
charmless. For
a trashy sadistic fantasy, it even has a measure of personality.

I'm not saying it's a
good movie, but it has more panache than its reputation would suggest.
It opens
with a cheerful take on Easy Rider, as two slim
brunettes ride a
motorcycle down the open road while a guitar chugs out a close-enough
approximation of the riff from "Born to Be Wild." (The score, heavy
on bluesy rock guitar and percussion freakouts, is pretty groovy
throughout.
Regrettably, I've had no luck Googling up any information on the
composer.)
There are even some obvious attempts at symbolism–the sort of stuff
that
denotes a real movie. In one of the early scenes, two of the women are
wearing
similar blue kerchiefs. Passive Ana (Ana Carro) wears hers folded flat
over her
hair, like a housewife, or maybe a refugee from a Doris Day movie, as
she gets
high on the gang's own supply of coke. But leader of the pack Susanna
(Liliana
Fernández Blanco) wears hers rolled around her forehead like a bandana,
in the
fashion befitting a revolutionary. As the gang of women hovers
menacingly over
strung-out Ana, the film cuts to a phallic smokestack looming overhead
in a scene
that introduces alpha male Satán (Enrique Larratelli) as the leader of
the
pack.

Admirers of Mario
Bava–or perhaps his lower-rent Spanish cousin, Jess
Franco–may
appreciate the arrested flamboyance of one scene in which a woman in a
fedora
and oversized raincoat emerges from a stall in an airport men's room to
knife a
random dude in the back, then flees, fabulously, into the great
outdoors. Then
there are the various softcore sex scenes, offering a voyeuristic view
of
ladies underthings' and more as they appeared in generations past.
Sleaze gains
a certain sweetness if it sits on the shelf long enough; it becomes
almost quaint and charming. That's why The Slaughter
still holds some interest
as a period piece. And I was a tiny bit impressed when the film
introduced a
German arms dealer criticized for selling guns to Arabs, who use
them,
presumably, to kill Jews.

OK, shaming Germans
and disparaging Palestine in the same breath doesn't count as a bold
political
move, but it does demonstrate a modicum of ambition.
Unfortunately, the
overall level of control displayed by director Michael Findlay over his
material isn't very high (Roberta was the cinematographer). The violent
content
includes a scene of unconvincing toe-cutting seemingly tailored for
foot
fetishists, a couple of unconvincing stabbings, and several
unconvincing
deaths-by-squib. The sexual content includes a genuinely vulgar scene
where a
teenager watches a farmer milk a cow, nudge nudge wink wink, for
several long
and uncomfortable moments before she's raped. Roberta Findlay's idea of
day-for-night photography seems to involve printing the scenes in
monochrome,
where they take on a drab blue cast (presumably because the
black-and-white
scenes were printed to colour stock, which tends to shift to blue
under those
circumstances). The performances are mostly appalling, though they're
not
helped by resolutely indifferent dubbing (since the actors didn't all
speak
English, the whole film was shot MOS) that sounds like it was recorded inside that airport men's room. There's a long carnival
sequence
padded out with obvious (and endless) cutaways to stock
footage. The picture becomes truly hilaribad whenever the Findlays juice it up with every
tool at
their disposal, resorting to cheesy chestnuts like the sudden zoom-in
to an
extreme close-up in the middle of someone's line reading (in this case,
the
punchline is "Eichmann!"), or trotting out semi-expressionist
editorial techniques in the cutting room.

Snuff3

While I'm not a
connoisseur of early-1970s trash cinema, I've seen more than my share,
and The
Slaughter
doesn't strike me as appreciably worse than your
typical
grindhouse programmer of the era. The Findlays' efforts from the 1960s
use many of the same stylistic techniques but play better in the context of
no-frills
sex films than they do in this marginally more ambitious,
ripped-from-today's-headlines narrative, where they come across as
pretentious
affectations.

But what might make Snuff the quintessential American exploitation film is what happened
to it
after the Findlays were done with it. Different sources tell the story
in
different ways, but The Slaughter either tanked
so badly in its first
few engagements that it never rolled out across the country, or it was
deep-sixed immediately by a distributor who found it unmarketable on
any scale.
However it got shelved, it remained there for years until the
distributor,
Allan Shackleton, had the idea to shoot a five-minute coda that
advanced the
unlikely premise that, at the end of shooting, the filmmakers
themselves kept
rolling as they (SPOILER ALERT) dismembered and disembowelled
a woman for real on camera. No, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and of course
the scene
is far from convincing. The stage blood registers with the same
unrealistic
Day-Glo colour that's familiar to viewers of such early gore classics
as Blood
Feast
, the tubing pumping the fake stuff onto the bed is
painfully evident
in at least one shot, and the prosthetics are not exactly up to, er,
snuff.
Nevertheless, Shackleton mounted a coy campaign that hinted at
unsavoury
origins for the footage ("Made in South America, where life is
cheap!" blared the tagline) and wound up creating a minor sensation as
feminists, church groups, and other pillars of the community reliably
turned
out to protest its engagements.2

The irony is that
Shackleton's plan to fix the film may have saved it commercially, but
the
coda he came up with is so graceless and opportunistic that it ends up
making The
Slaughter
look good by comparison. I'm not saying that The
Slaughter

was The Magnificent Ambersons, just that it's easy to enjoy a
lousy movie that's made by well-meaning people who are only trying to
show you
a good time, offering up some killer chicks in and out of bikinis, a
half-hearted murder plot, and a dash of gunplay. The
Slaughter

delivers on those fronts. Snuff, on the other
hand, is out to trick you;
it thinks it's smarter than you. And that's only possible because it
thinks
that you, dear viewer, are tragically stupid. It's the truest kind of
exploitation film because it's utterly pernicious. Snuff
doesn't lie to
you, exactly, but it believes there's a good chance you'll
buy the
line of bullshit it's selling anyway.

I'm well aware that
movies like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal
Activity
, and
others have followed Snuff's marketing lead by
failing to, let's say,
dissuade viewers of the veracity of the events depicted, found-footage-style,
on screen. Yet those tactics were meant to enhance what was already
there,
underscoring the gimmick and giving the movie a better shot
commercially.
Though Shackleton's efforts to rescue The Slaughter
from the trash heap
were undeniably successful, they're an affront to the filmmakers as
well as to
the audience, both of which Shackleton apparently holds in contempt.
(If
nothing else, it's a stunning violation of droit d'auteur
that earned
Shackleton a lawsuit eventually settled out of court.) Snuff's
final
shot, in which a joker wearing a T-shirt reading "Vida es Muerte"
holds a few butcher-shop cast-offs aloft, screaming, as if they were the
very
entrails of the maiden prone on the bed before him, is worth a laugh
not for
the hamminess of the performance, the grossness of its execution, or the
paucity of its imagination, but for the nakedness of its cynicism. This
kind of
cinema is enough to put you off the stuff entirely.

Snuff4

THE
BLU-RAY DISC

Blue Underground said
(via its Facebook account) that it searched unsuccessfully for a
complete cut
of The Slaughter to put on its Blu-ray upgrade of Snuff. Shame they couldn't turn it up–that never-before-seen
version would
have been a strong contender for cult-movie find of the decade. (An
addition to
the opening title card indicates that, as of 2013, Blue
Underground owns all rights to the film, so there shouldn't be any
licensing
issues to work out if a complete print ever does turn up.) Well, you
master the
Blu-ray with the movie you have, not the movie you wish you had, and
Blue
Underground has done right by Snuff. Some
videophiles will sniff at the
grainy picture (I'm inclined to believe sources claiming that Slaughter
was originally shot in 16mm), while others will wonder why it wasn't
subject to more rigorous dust-and-scratch removal. Me, I like it the
way it is: This is one of those rare discs that has a truly breathtaking, film-like
appearance.

Although the image is
far from perfect, it has the texture and feel of a print,
including the
inevitable flaws. If this pillarboxed 1.67:1, 1080p transfer was as hands-off as it appears, Blue
Underground found a pretty solid copy of Snuff
to work from, harvesting rich colours and adequately broad dynamic range. The blacks sometimes
have a
crushed feel, but that's likely to be a product of good old
underexposure in
the shadows as opposed to any error in the transfer. It's a gorgeous
print,
occasionally riddled with scratches–but that's entirely appropriate to
the
mood of the piece, and it certainly beats the application of aggressive
noise-reduction techniques. Some shots are softer than others, probably
owing
to inconsistencies in the source material. The bitrate isn't especially
high
but probably doesn't need to be. I didn't notice much in the way of
artifacting, despite the heavy grain, and the film and bonus features
(some in
SD) fit comfortably on a BD-25. In all, this movie isn't
going to
look much better unless someone gets a chance to scan the camera
negative.

As for the DTS-HD MA
1.0 soundtrack, well, it is what it is. The audio is quite thin, and
when a
lot is going on–shouting or screaming over the high-decibel rock
soundtrack,
for example–the different sound elements dissolve into a cold porridge
of
noise. It's unremarkable, though it's obviously limited by the elements.
It sounds
way better than it would have had someone decided to try spreading
it out
across six channels.

Supplements new to this Blu-ray are anchored by "Shooting Snuff",
a
10-minute interview (by extras maven Michael Felsher) with filmmaker
Carter
Stevens (Wicked Schoolgirls, The Love
Couch
), whose insert stage
was used for the tacked-on ending of Snuff,
overseen by one Simon
Nuchtern of the New York-based outfit August Films. He recalls the
shoot
("Quite frankly, the special effects sucked") and the ensuing
controversy around the picture's opening in Times Square ("I'm sure he made
back
his money in less than a week"), although he waffles when
it
comes to the question of whether Shackleton hired protesters
to stand
in front of the theatre. It's still a terrific bit of scholarship on
behalf of
the project.

Next is "Up to Snuff,"
a seven-minute monologue by director Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher,
Drive,
Only God Forgives), who offers an engaging
critique of Snuff/The Slaughter (and the
hysteria over what was imagined to be an epidemic of actual snuff
films)–a
tiny, mischievous smile occasionally dancing across his face as he
looks at the
camera just a little bit sideways. My favourite comment comes during his separate 44-second optional intro to the film, when he says, "To me, this was the New Wave version
of
horror films," and compares Snuff, cheekily, to Jean-Luc Godard. I
thought he was having a laugh until I realized the
obvious comparison
would be Week End, with its violent,
bandana-wearing revolutionaries pontificating in the jungle.

"Bill Kelly:
Porn Buster" is a standard-def interview, prepared circa 2000, with a retired
FBI
agent who specialized in obscenity investigations and spent much time
looking
into the urban legend of snuff films but came up empty, having sent an
informant around the country to try to procure a commercially-produced
snuff movie with no luck. Kelly does mention Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, whom
he
describes as "a couple of yahoos out in California" he claims did indeed kill women on camera, but dismisses them as amateurs. "That
was a
personal escapade. It was not for commercial development." It's grim
material, but Blue Underground's faux hard-boiled
music bed sets precisely the right tone. I just wish there had been a way to
cover the
infamous Guinea Pig case that saw Charlie Sheen contacting the FBI
after
watching the particularly sadistic Japanese horror film Flower
of Flesh and
Blood
, given to him by the late writer and noted gorehound
Chas Balun.

It's a shame that Blue
Underground wasn't able to round out the special features with a contribution
by
someone involved in the making of The
Slaughter
itself. A
three-minute U.S. trailer is presented in SD, as is a two-minute German
trailer
under the colourful title of American Cannibale
(it's set in Argentina, mein
Freunde
, but don't let that stop you). Also on board is a
"controversy
gallery" with press clippings from the time of Snuff's
original
release that yield some interesting tidbits. I was amused to learn that
screenings of Snuff were apparently picketed by
the Adult Film
Association of America (now the Free Speech Coalition), who claimed it
gave
X-rated movies a bad name. Finally, you can step through "Snuff:
The
Seventies and Beyond," an essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who
literally wrote the book on rape-revenge films. It might be nicer to
have this
as part of the accompanying booklet, but Snuff
doesn't come with a
booklet. (It's not that kind of film.) There is, however, reversible
jacket
art, allowing you to choose your particular poison. For what it's
worth, you
may as well buy it now, while it's available in a blood-red plastic
case that
delightfully complements the three-colour key art. You may not pull it
off the
shelf that often, but it could have real value as a conversation piece.

1.
Many sources, including one Blue Underground interviewed for this Blu-ray release, refer to the film as Slaughter,
others (such as IMDb and the MPAA's filmratings.com) as The
Slaughter
.
Roberta Findlay, a primary source in this affair (Michael Findlay and
Allan
Shackleton are both long dead) if perhaps not entirely a reliable one,
is
quoted using the latter in an interview that appeared in THE NEW
YORK PRESS. return

2.
According to the 1993 tome Killing
for
Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff

by
David Kerekes and David Slater, Shackleton laid the groundwork
for the
Snuff ad campaign in 1975 by anonymously spreading
the false story that
some nefarious filmmakers had smuggled a real snuff film into the U.S.
from South America. If this version of the story is true, Shackleton's
achievement seems all the more audacious. return


Snuff5

Become a patron at Patreon!

3 Comments

  1. No seemed offended when the Coen Brothers claimed at the beginning of “Fargo” that it was a true story, but I don’t see how that’s any less slimy a trick than “Snuff.”

  2. No seemed offended when the Coen Brothers claimed at the beginning of “Fargo” that it was a true story, but I don’t see how that’s any less slimy a trick than “Snuff.”

  3. No seemed offended when the Coen Brothers claimed at the beginning of “Fargo” that it was a true story, but I don’t see how that’s any less slimy a trick than “Snuff.”

Comments are closed