Snuff is the very definition of a horror movie. The horror is that people watched it, the victim this time was me. Trying to capitalize on the Manson murders, this film is kind of a recreation, maybe. That's as accurate as I can be, because there's no real storyline, just a bunch of hippies that kill people at random then speak gibberish to each other.

The dialog is as stupid as possible, lots of utter nonsense like "the butcher needs the jackel to cut his meat." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. When it made sense it was still absolutely stupid.

The acting is literally the worst I've ever encountered. Every college in America has a theater school filled with people who would jump at the chance to dub the english on a movie, yet the filmmakers decided to use people who could barely read the lines. I'm talking intensely bad. There's no way you can imagine how bad it really is. At one point a little girls voice is done by what had to be an adult male pretending to be a little girl. My God it was horrible.

Luckily, lots of people died. To make the film more entertaining I pretended that they were really dying as punishment for being in this film. Usually that works, but death was too good for them, they should have been tortured first. By the time the first nudity appeared, I couldn't enjoy it. My eyes had already dilated as I slipped into a misery-induced coma.

The Mansonesque guy was named "Saton", how many seconds did they put into thinking that one up? I'm guessing zero, which is how long writing the movie would take for someone with an IQ of 71.

This movie actually created the urban legend of "snuff films". There was a rumor that the Manson family had filmed their activities. It wasn't true, but the filmmaker had just finished this flick. He tacked on an ending where one of the actresses is supposedly murdered by the film crew just for kicks. He then hired people to follow the film around the country protesting the "actual murder" in the film.

No, the killing wasn't real, it didn't even look remotely real. But a legend was born because Findlay was a better ad-man than movie-maker. If you decide to watch this movie, do yourself a favor and fast forward to the last scene, you don't deserve to suffer through it all.

To be fair the ending is nothing to do with the Findlay's. It was purely the work of Producer/Distributor Allan Shackleton.

Around 1971 Mike and Roberta Findlay went to South America…where wages are cheap…to make a film based on the still fresh in the American mind 'Manson Murders'.

Titled Slaughter, the film was a badly dubbed (mostly Argentinian actors were used), cheap and not so cheerful flick that secured a handful of South American play dates before drifting off down the river of slime that is the fate of scuzzy exploitation flicks that fail to click with the discerning fans of such things.

But it would live again.

Roughly 5 years later Producer Allan Shackleton picked the film up. Shackleton was an infamous man to work with. A hard line, take the money and run, exploitation distributer. And he smelt money in the flop that was "Slaughter".
He removed the final minutes of "Slaughter" (The Findlay's denied any involvement in this, and Roberta especially never acknowledged the film that "Slaughter" became as their film any longer) and pasted on his own ending.
Reportedly shot by a Horacio Fredriksson and Simon Nuchtern.

This new finale shows the 'real' film crew finishing the previous scene in "Slaughter", getting turned on by the violence, and deciding to really kill the actress for the camera! That the actress replacing the one in the Findlay's actual movie, looks nothing at all like their actual actress seemed unimportant. So we see the 'actress' tortured and eventually murdered…Just before the camera supposedly runs out of film.

Thus was born one of the greatest marketing scams in the history of film.

'Snuff' films were an obscure urban legend. Shadowed rumours of unfortunates put in front of a camera and killed…For real! It was a fledgling term at the time, but Shackleton would catapult it into everyday life.
Releasing false reports to the Press that Police had 'discovered' a film from South America ("Where life is cheap", as Shakelton would famously say on his ad campaign for his film) that supposedly showed a woman being really murdered.

It was a move that also tapped in to the public 'fear' of those evil South American Dictatorships where masked men working for the Government would torture, rape and kill undesirables in dark cellars. The Press ate it up, and soon headlines about this 'snuff' film were screaming their free advertising around the good old U.S of A.

Now was the time for Shackleton to unleash his monster! "Slaughter" was now the aforementioned Snuff.
With wonderfully exploitative ads and protesters (hired by Shackelton) standing outside some Cinemas showing the film, waving signs like 'Ban this filth' (you know, the old favourites), Shakleton soon found he had a winner on his hands.

As the Press caught on to the hype, and real misguided protesters started picketing the Grindhouse cinemas that were daring to show the movie 'where an actress is REALLY KILLED', "Snuff" was garnered with even more free publicity of the kind this type of film thrives on.
And the rest is history....

I usually enjoy cheaply made, 70's exploitation flicks. The fashions, music, filming styles, hell even the bad dubbing tends to keep me relatively entertained. The only thing that kept this movie in the DVD player was the fact that I was writing a review for a completely different film at the same time, keeping my attention sufficiently divided.

Did no one notice that actress that was supposedly killed at the end looked nothing like any of the actresses in the film? Or that the blood was the same tomato paste color that was used in the film? Or that the camera work was still made up of different angles and cuts? I think it’s safe to say that the do-gooders who were protesting this thing never actually watched the movie.

While I didn’t hate it as much as The Horrorist, I’d only recommend this to the biggest fans of the subgenre.

2 out of 10 movies that reminded me of a time when everyone topless in movies had tan lines. Remember that? You don’t see that anymore.