.
Is it possible that I'm just getting tired of watching cinematic sadism?
Killer View (aka Snuffed) made me think the curiosity's been sapped from the serial killer genre. I get it; I got it awhile ago and now it's all starting to seem, dare I say it, gratuitous. Basically a mish-mash of
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (which kept things lively by posing itself as non-fiction set in the fictional world of slasher movies) and
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, with some
Poughkeepsie Tapes heavily sprinkled on top,
Snuffed tells the story of a preordained deceased journalist - at the start the film tells us the footage we're watching was found by the police once he went missing - who gets the lucky chance to interview an active - but supposedly retiring; he's the
Sergeant Murtaugh of slashers - serial killer. We then watch this interview interspersed with footage from one of his "jobs."
They're "jobs" because, in a
Hostel Part 2 sorta twist that adds a dash of cultural commentary, the killer films his killings and sells them to bored rich types. He also says he pretty much exclusively kills the rich (I kinda kept waiting for him to
hit somebody in the head with a gigantic ceramic penis). I also kept waiting for it turn out that he turns around and kills rich people he just made one of his films for, say for the next set of rich folks, but besides a late-game accidental nod in that direction that was a twist too far, I guess.
Maybe because my boyfriend's Southern and has attuned me to keep an eye out for the stereotype, but the fact that the killer postures himself as thoroughly redneck - the scruff and twang and sleeveless tees of it all - seemed to need some explanation. He argues he's selling himself as a professional brand, and that he needs to drive a fancy car to fit in the neighborhoods where he goes a'hunting, but then he presents himself physically and verbally like Redneck #3 in a
Deliverance knock-off. I think an argument could be made that his clients request this sort of show, that it fits their idea of the type they desire for their sadistic fantasies, but if this were the case the film never lets on as such. And what it needed was a rug-pull of this sort - something to give it a spurt of extra interest.
Take JT Petty's 2006 film
S&Man, which is very nearly the same film, if not tonally then execution-wise - a filmmaker gets the chance to interview the maker of eerily realistic snuff films, and we watch the interviews and the death scenes commingle. There Petty kept things moving by bringing in other voices and by actively questioning the nature of what we were watching at every turn, and depending on that nature from there asking what is the purpose of it? Whose entertainment is this for?
I do think it was a thought-through choice by the makers of
Snuffed to be as straight-forward as possible here; I think there's a purposeful distancing from that sort of intellectualism and cinematic trickery. By telling us from the start that the journalist we're watching put himself into danger is totally 100% already dead, it diverts our attention from the suspense of "Will he get killed?" onto other things. It's like Hitchcock having Kim Novak spill the beans on the plot in her letter at the midpoint in
Vertigo
- we stop paying attention to the "mystery" that we thought the film was about, and just start paying attention to how the characters are behaving inside a plot we already understand the mechanics of.
But bringing Hitch into the mix here only serves to sour the mood more - everything Hitch put his characters through was just as foretold and emotionally sadistic as anything
Snuffed spills out, but the latter goes the extra distance by erasing all the cinematic art at all, and I was just left wondering what there was left for me to want to be watching. There's an attempt at achieving some clever symmetry through editing, especially in the final few minutes when our two strands - interview and snuff - begin to reach their similar predestined conclusions. But it situates itself at an uneasy and probably impossible impasse - it wants to seem as unobtrusive a document as it can while at the same time, you know,
not actually being an actual snuff film, and presumably attempting to make some sort of commentary on what the hell makes any of us watch these things in the first place. The only thing
Snuffed really made me realize for its 75 minutes is I have no idea.
.
Posts
