Snuff Movie (2005)

Snuff Movie is yet another on a rapidly growing list of movies that contains a good idea at its core, but somewhere along the way forgets all about it to become a huge pile of incomprehensible drivel instead. Trying too hard to be post-post-post-modern, Snuff Movie forgoes any semblance of sense or logic -- even before all the nonsensical twists kick in -- and so it's just dross.

The film revolves around a reclusive film director who's come out of retirement to make a new movie. He was driven out of the movie business when some obsessed fans murdered his wife in an effort to recreate a scene from one of his films, but now, for whatever reason, he's back. Only in the intervening years, he's gone a bit loopy. So he invites several fame-hungry, but not very good, actors to his house to audition overnight, with the caveat that they stay in character the whole time. However, it soon emerges that the film he's making is about his wife's murder, in an almost neat art-imitates-life-imitates-art circle, and some of the violence is a little too real...

Only, then, it seems, it's not real after all. But then it is. And then it isn't. And then it is. And then there's the requisite nonsense reveal at the end just to really ensure there is no possible interpretation of events that will accommodate all of the evidence (see also: Dead End).

There are so many problems with the film that it's hard to know where to start. There are too many logic holes, for one thing, even before any of the twists - the actors aren't in character the whole time, and the director keeps talking to them out of character anyway. Their characters aren't consistent, and at least two of the cannon-fodder types just don't make sense. They don't have any motivation for acting the way they do. It's pointless trying to figure out which parts are 'acting' and which parts are 'real', because none of it makes sense; they're either playing badly written parts, or ... they're playing badly written parts. And at no point does an actual movie get made.

Because of the bigger, overarching logical flaws in the film, it seems almost daft to try to point out the smaller ones, but some of them include the fact that British police really, really wouldn't be carrying those guns; the boyfriend really wouldn't bother to go to the police station in person before trying to call them first; you'd need a hell of a lot more cameras than they had if you wanted to track a person's eye movements and see what they were seeing; if you had that many cameras, why would you then pick up a handheld and walk around with it?; why is this director so well respected given that the footage we're shown of his best-known film looks like a really shitty Hammer Horror ripoff?; if 'Jack' had been a part of the fake-out and knew everything was done with props for the film, why does he then proceed to do what he does to his girlfriend?; why does his girlfriend do what she does, other than to up the nudity content of the movie?...

It just goes on and on and on and it's really, really not worth it. No thought or intelligence has gone into anything in this movie. There are some quite interesting ideas somewhere deep, deep down, just to make the film really frustrating rather than just stupid, but they're not followed through, they're not taken to their logical conclusions, they're just slapped on film and forgotten about.

And that's what I'm going to do with this movie. Forget it.

Oh, but, finally -- Lionsgate? Please sack the idiot who put that massive spoiler on the menu. There was one really, really nice moment near the beginning that it ruined, and considering how bad the rest of the movie was, I'd've liked to enjoy that one tiny glimmer of cleverness.

IMDB link

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