Snuff Movie

By all accounts, Bernard ‘Candyman’ Rose was given considerable freedom to direct this self-penned, would-be multi-layered haunted-house horror. Well, sadly, it was enough rope to hang himself. Jeroen Krabbé stars as the diabolical, dangerously deluded filmmaker Boris Arkadin, who summons a group of actors to his creepy manse, ostensibly for an audition, in fact to enact a ‘real-life’ horror for a live web-cast. Too clever by half, ‘Snuff-Movie’ throws in a potted stylistic history of horror –  from its Hammer-esque Victorian opening sequence to 1970s ‘verité’-style footage of a Manson-esque bloodbath to Ken Russell-ish satanic rites – and attempts to bind it all together with a jumbled thesis on the dangerous seductions of filmmaking and the threatening possibilities of cyber-technology. If there’s some fun to be had it’s in its frenzied plagiarism. It certainly fails as a thriller, is too pompous to be funny, often gratuitous (casting-couch nudity, et al) and rather gauchely directed.