La scène du crime

My review was written in October 1990 after watching the film on Atlas Video cassette.

That old bugaboo, snuff filming, is resurrected for this boring South African feature, filmed in 1988 with the better title "Final Cut".

John Barrett plays a detective checking into a murder that boy witness Matthew Stewardson knows to be a killing during the lensing of a snuff film. The straitlaced cops, led by Evan Klisser, balk at the idea of relying on the testimony of a 13-year-old witness.

The pornographers plant a bomb that almost kills the boy's mom, Ayala Katz. With very little footage devoted to the exploitation content of producing snuff films, picture disintegrates into dull police procedure and fake suspense involving Kata' stay in hospital.

South African cast tries to cover up their accents with only varying success and the film suffers from a "white noise" effect afflicting many foreign videos, in which an echoing distortion is mixed on the soundtrack to cover background noise.