SNUFF 102

A young journalist finds herself, unwittingly, face to face with a ruthless torturer who is also a snuff movie producer. The maniac lures young women and keeps them prisoners in a room, tortures them, and films his acts with a camera, and 102 is indeed the number of his victims. The rather difficult and niche subgenre of snuff movies, which includes some of the most shocking and bloodiest films in cinema history, although one could open an endless debate about what is cinema and what is not, considering the form and typical content of this genre. Snuff, by definition, subverts the canons of classical cinematography in favor of a realism that, as such, does not need a script, care of photography, direction, etc. The only rule is to give the images, often filmed in real-time with a handheld camera, as truthful an appearance as possible. Sometimes, the result is so close to reality that it raises doubts and controversies: "Flowers of Flesh and Blood," one of the most successful episodes of the Japanese series "Guinea Pig" is perhaps the most famous example, reported by actor Charlie Sheen who, seeing it, thought it was a real film, thus denouncing its existence. And how not to mention the saga "August Underground" by Vogel, one of the perhaps most representative and extreme works of the genre? "Snuff 102" was born in the wake of the films mentioned above, placing itself, in a virtual ranking, among the highest for the degree of brutality and violence it enjoys. Although it uses a more traditional filming technique, the real effect is not sacrificed; the direction is deliberately imperfect, the editing is frantic and convulsive, and everything is seasoned with the use of bichromatic that helps the viewer orient themselves in the chronology of events. From a narrative point of view, there is little to say, except that we are provided with a portrait of the maniac through the expedient of the interview: an idea not particularly well thought out since serving up the motivations and "justifications" of a sadistic torturer on a silver platter diminishes the character's strength, which lies precisely in the madness and irrationality of his actions. The madman thus indulges in rants about morality and other banal social reflections aimed in some way at "humanizing" him, expressing pseudo-intellectual concepts that seem rather out of place in such a context. The film's strong point, needless to say, lies in the torture scenes, extreme, excessive, and also well executed. In a small dark and rotten room, under the watchful eye of the camera, all kinds of atrocities are committed: rapes, necrophilia, pissing, dismemberments, and more. The film's flaw is that the violence is shown repeatedly throughout its duration, that is, 1 hour and 40 minutes, a span of time decidedly too long that inevitably causes yawns with the consequent loss of the shock effect; a shorter duration would certainly have "lightened" the viewing, making it also more digestible. I do not recommend it, however, to those who are not particularly accustomed to the genre, and anyway, if you really want to see it, do so on an empty stomach.