Snapshot

I imagine that the Americans and Canadians who went to see this Australian movie in theaters in the 70s felt ripped off. For starters, it was retitled "The Day Before Halloween", yet it has NOTHING to do with the John Carpenter movie of 1978. The only similarity it has is with some of the piano music, which sort of sounds like Carpenter's score at times. But even if the movie had been released over here under its original name, viewers would have felt ripped off. For large chunks of the movie, absolutely NOTHING of consequence happens. All that you'll get out of the movie is that the modelling business can be a cold and cutthroat experience, something I think that any viewer would know already. The trivia section for this movie says that the script was written in ten days. It shows.

Quite recently I watched a marvelous documentary on Australian exploitation cinema entitled "Not Quite Hollywood: the True, Untold Story of Ozploitation" – which I highly recommend to anyone – and it really stimulated me to track down a lot of titles I've never even heard about before. "Snapshot" is one of them; a peculiar psycho-thriller/melodrama hybrid that coincidentally came out shortly after the huge box office success of "Halloween" and thus had to be re-titled "The Day After Halloween" in order to make extra money and cash in on the success of John Carpenter's classic. Obviously this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Halloween, Michael Myers or Haddonfield and hopefully not too many people will be beguiled by this cheap marketing scam. I'm not even too sure "Snapshot" fully qualifies as horror, since the film barely features any genuine moments of fright. Despite the still relatively low number of independent cult movies produced in Australia around that time, "Snapshot" is an adequate and professional accomplishment with proper production values, respectable performances and ambitious story contents. Heck, the film is so ambitious that the drama overrules and the thriller elements never really even come through. "Snapshot" is much more of a satiric portrait of the sleazy and dishonest advertising/modeling industry than it is a nail-biting suspense thriller. Director Simon Wincer ("Harlequin", "Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man") seemingly never ceases to enlarge the melodramatic universe surrounding the main character Angela, but actually there's very few action. 19-year-old Angela is lurid into shooting a topless modeling ad by an eloquent and she promptly gets offered a job as the face of a perfume brand. Angela is very enthusiast and moves in with her photographer, especially since she's tired of her domineering mother and dead-end job at the hair dresser salon. She rapidly adapts to her new classy life and doesn't even have to bother anymore about her stalking ex-boyfriend and his (not-so) inconspicuous ice cream van. However, she learns this is predominantly a rotten world full of greed, betrayal, false promises, sexual harassment, blackmail and danger. As said, "Snapshot" is a plain straightforward coming-of-age drama falsely advertised as a genuine horror movie. There are two noteworthy sequences near the very end, but they hardly seem worth waiting for. This could be an interesting and compelling viewing experience, but then you better know beforehand to expect a serious-toned film instead of a brainless slasher imitation.

"Snapshot" is like one of those pretend-cautionary tales churned out in England in the '70s about the dangers of whatever flashy lifestyle teens have probably heard about on the news. See "Groupie Girl", "Cool it Carol", and a bunch of other things directed by the likes of Pete Walker for some examples.

The hilarious thing about these movies was that they were always at least as exploitative as the practices and individuals they were supposed to be condemning.

"Snapshot" continues this fine trend in international cinema. There was no reason to make it except to show a very young Sigrid Thornton topless, and there is no reason to watch it except to see a very young Sigrid Thornton topless.

The movie is some nonsense about a struggling hair dresser who is thrown out of home by her bitchy mother but is then offered big money to be a model. She does one topless photo shoot, is promised many more, but the phone stops ringing unless she submits to the sleazy wiles of another photographer and finally her lesbian-in-disguise best friend.

With twenty minutes to spare, the movie remembers it is supposed to be a horror flick, perhaps because it doesn't know how else to resolve the dilemma it poses for the heroine other than killing off a bunch of the characters.

All the finger wagging, this is what happens when you dare to dream big stuff is so tedious and trite you will just be waiting for it to be over. The sleazy photographer guy invites Thornton over to his house for a nice dinner - just the two of them. But wait, he wants to take photos, and he wants her to take off her clothes! There is at least one good piece of advice in there for any model wannabes: if a photographer tells you to take off your clothes but is so desperate to sound classy that he asks you in French, you're really in trouble.

The horror stuff at the end also sucks. There is no attempt at scares or suspense or tension. It's just a boring forced ending, though you can't help but smile at someone getting run over by their own Mr Whippy van.

Australian cinema has always been somewhat schizophrenic. On one hand, you have your lofty art-house efforts made by the likes of Peter Weir or Peter Noyce, though both of these pillars of pictorial culture have been known to let their hair down on occasion. Thankfully, these are balanced out by a heaping helping of what has now affectionately become known as "Ozploitation" : kinda like the Down Under version of quintessential drive-in fodder. Likewise, they mostly thrived throughout the '70s and '80s and were given a lucrative second life in the early days of VHS. These were the flicks that put bums in seats domestically, frequently featuring enough sex 'n violence to satiate the Saturday night crowd.

Producer Antony Ginnane proved a key figure in the history of them Aussie "aberrations", cheerfully bankrolling Richard Franklin's sexploitation classic FANTASM (and its inevitable sequel FANTASM COMES AGAIN!) as well as both versions - 1982 original and 2014 remake - of British Brian Trenchard-Smith's notorious survival slasher TURKEY SHOOT. Clearly, this is a guy who can coax otherwise respectable filmmakers out of their comfort zone. Case in point being dependable dullard Simon Wincer who went on to fail-safe family features like D.A.R.Y.L., the Disney-funded OPERATION DUMBO DROP and the phenomenally successful FREE WILLY. With a background in domestic cathode ray crime drama like HOMICIDE and CHOPPER SQUAD, Wincer was seriously prepared to "slum" it when Ginnane gave him the opportunity to leap from to small to big screen which resulted in a pair of practically impossible to pigeonhole genre flicks : the quirky fantasy HARLEQUIN (1980) and its predecessor SNAPSHOT.

Posing as a routine slice 'n dicer (its US release title was THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN!), this is actually anything but. Apart from an unsettling opening scene, telegraphing its conclusion with the remnants of an as of yet unidentified charred corpse and a female crime scene interloper hysterically calling out for "Angie", it takes more than half the film's running time before anything overtly horrible takes place. What viewers get instead is a surprisingly engrossing character-based drama about a naive young innocent (Sigrid Thornton's tellingly named Angela) in the big bad city, in this case Melbourne. A former child actress, Thornton would proceed to become one of the Continent's most revered thespians, this particular oddity a singular "blot" on an otherwise spotless state of service. If she realized this was time spent in the "gutter", her effortlessly engaging performance certainly doesn't bear any traces thereof.

A timid little hairdresser at the salon of domineering Mr. Plunkett (Jon Sidney, who played General MacArthur in Philippe Mora's DEATH OF A SOLDIER), Angela makes an immediate life-changing decision at the behest of worldly model Madeline (exceptionally well-portrayed by Greek-born Chantal Contouri who hit a career high in '79 with this and Rod Hardy's oddball vampire flick THIRST) to "give it all up" in pursuit of a modeling career with "outré" fashion photographer Linsey (Hugh Keays-Byrne, yep, MAD MAX's indelible Toecutter himself). Finding her suitcase packed and the locks changed by her overbearing mother (respected UK actress Julia Blake who has but one, albeit absolutely unforgettable scene) in the wake of a nude photo spread, Angie moves into Linsey's studio where several hapless "professionals" seem to pass through on their way up or down the social ladder.

Notwithstanding her apparently harmless shutterbug, men in general seem to spell bad news for the up 'n coming cover cutie. There's older ex-boyfriend Daryl (creepy Vincent Gil, another MAD MAX alumnus) who stalks her all across town in his Mr. Whippy ice cream van (a curiously effective choice of vehicle) and even Madeline's film producer husband (the late veteran character actor Robert Bruning) can barely keep his hands off once his wife's back is turned. Meanwhile, she's receiving strange threats and someone may indeed want her dead but who ? Bearing in mind the movie's unsettling start, you just know there will be tears before bedtime.

Fairly unpredictable screenplay by Everett De Roche, who wrote the cult favorites ROAD GAMES (Franklin, 1981) and RAZORBACK (Russell Mulcahy, 1984), keeps the audience guessing by cleverly turning clichés upside down. This doesn't always hit the bullseye (a final twist prefiguring Gordon Willis' notorious WINDOWS leaves a bad aftertaste) but at least blocks out boredom setting in. Composer Brian May, whose ivory-tinkling score sounds like a cross between '70s TV show cues and Golden Age porno music (awesome, if you're like me, or awful, if you're not), is NOT the guy from Queen but one of Australia's busiest soundtrack suppliers of the period, adding atmosphere to the MAD MAX movies (again!) and assorted genre treats such as David Hemmings' THE SURVIVOR and Manny Cotto's DR. GIGGLES. Two pathetic pop songs by the band "Sherbet" (cool name...NOT!) are just icing on the cake. The boobs 'n blood quotient is rather mild but fans will be pleased to know that Thornton bares 'em without shame. This is one flick that knows its target audience better than they know themselves and treats it with more respect than you'd expect from exploitation entrepreneurs.

I agree with the posters who liked Snap Shot, and I appreciate some of the things they pointed out. In fact, it might deserve more than six stars, but I'd have to see it again sometime and decide more if comparisons to some of the depth of Mulholland Dr. hold water.

I chanced upon it on TCM cable channel, not knowing anything much in advance. It's not a horror or slasher flick, and it's neither terrifying (well, maybe the little sister...) nor exactly campy/fun. And bad pan-and-scan movement got distracting toward the end of the movie. That seemed strange because the image didn't fill the TV screen anyway, yet clearly there was still a bunch of frame missing.

Call it a bracing slice-of-(weird)-life coming-of-age melodrama with horror aspects. Don't expect a great film and don't expect an exciting film, but you'll find an interesting film with truly odd characters and touches and a sort of jauntily grim look at one young woman's options.

A reviewer mentioned that Thornton, the actress playing the central character, is like a cross between Elizabeth McGovern and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I didn't consciously notice that while watching, but seeing it pointed out, it's quite right. And JJL is one of my favorite actresses.