Snuff

"One could argue that there's a difference between the most detailed and the most appropriate presentation for a film on DVD (just because there's more bonus material available for American Pie than Citizen Kane doesn't mean the former merits a more elaborate package than the latter), and Blue Underground's DVD release of Snuff may well be the ultimate example of this theory in action. Snuff gained lasting infamy after producer and distributor Allan Shackleton launched a wildly successful rumor campaign to convince na?ve filmgoers that the film's onscreen murders were real (though few would be likely to believe that after seeing the film), and Blue Underground's disc has been designed to give off the air of forbidden fruit. Clad in a package printed to look like a brown paper wrapper (emblazoned with the film's ad slogan, ""The film that could only be made in South America...where life is CHEAP!""), with no credits or signs of its corporate origin (save for a UPC bar code), the Snuff disc has no menu, no chapter stops, no subtitles or captions, and no bonus material -- put it in your player, push play, and it'll just keep playing until you turn it off. In short, it looks and acts like the cheap bootleg you'd expect something like Snuff to be, except for the fact that this movie has never looked this good on home video before. The full-screen 1.33:1 image makes the most of the film's sometimes muddy camerawork, the source material is surprisingly clean and free of major blemishes, and the Dolby Digital Mono audio is crisp and reasonably clean, making the shoddy faux-dubbing all the more laughable (with Michael and Roberta Findlay's voices easily recognizable to grindhouse aficionados). Short of including a commentary track or bonus documentary explaining the nuts and bolts of the film's marketing -- one of the creepier and more fascinating frauds in the history of exploitation film history -- this is probably the ideal presentation for Snuff, a DVD that's in on the joke of the movie's lurid history."