Snuff is the New EVIL Industry Fad! “Snuff Queen” reviewed! (Dark Arts Entertainment / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on February 6, 2025

“Snuff Queen” on DVD from Dark Arts Entertainment!

Snuff, a hot commodity amongst patrons of the black market and dark web provides real violence and real death for real morbid viewers. Laws are challenged and circumvented by consent of women willing to die for money through various ways of asphyxiation in front of the camera and sold under the controversial snuffing genre. A Ten-minute window of revival separates the actors and actresses from permanent brain damage or certain expiration. A snuff performer interfaces with the complexity of thrills and easy money that counterbalances against relationship troubles, social stigma, and the constant threat of actually dying hanging over their heads, or more literally, pressed against their throats. A handful of willing performances lets a documentarian illustrate their niche profession, lifestyle, and personal struggles to the world with included behind-the-scenes footage on set and in their private spaces as they put on their line mind, body, and soul have to survive.

Those who seek out snuff, even if represented in a sensationalized, fictious way to glorify gore, violence, violence against women, and a fascination, obsession need to satisfy murder lust, likely need to have their heads thoroughly scoured for the tiniest ounce of sociopathic tendencies. Films like “Effects,” “Faces of Death,” “8MM,” “A Serbian Film,” and the like all contribute to that black desire of control of another person’s existence and getting off perversely on the sadism. Films like Sean Russell’s “Snuff Queen” are nothing like those more aberrant productions of cruel reproductions. The 2023 pseudo-documentary and mockumentary hybrid began in 2008 with AVN interviews with porn stars and their take the matter of snuff or overall rough sex. Shelved for many years because no producer at the time deemed the material worth making a movie out of it, Russell is approached by Dark Arts Entertainment’s Brian Yuzna and John Penney to finish the film with new scenes based off the 2008 script but cut most of the comedy out for a darker tone. David Navarro producers the film.

Previously shot 2008 AVN interview footage with some of the then biggest talent in the industry, such as Sasha Grey, Bree Olson, Stormy Daniels, Jenna Haze, Stoya, Faye Reagan, Jesse Jane, Belladonna, Aurora Snow, Jessica Drake, Sunny Lane, and even Larry Flynt, is cut into snippets of a montage as they comment on death and sex in various contexts. The series of comments and quips puts into perspective individual limitations, mindsets, behaviors, and an unfiltered truth underneath the layers of makeup, fake breasts, and forged happiness in the adult entertainment industry masked in glitzy red lights, supersized sex drives, and a prospecting tease of getting laid. As the 2008 prologue interviews ends, the 2023 interviews begin with mostly scripted talk following the daily lives of a handful of snuff performing women, 4 principal female characters to be exact. Moxie Owens (“Girl Lost: A Hollywood Story”) as Jane Doe, Lexie Leone (“It Don’t Bother Me at All”) as Amy Doe, Juliet Kennedy as Angela, and Lindsay Normington (“Anora”) as Audrey Doe become the diverse batch of short-listed actresses of controversial and law-bending snuff films. These core cast of women are joined by gap-filling support, ranging from gays, to blacks, to Asians, and so forth by extenuating out from just a white female dominated industry in touching cultural and race by the less promoted numbers of adult entertainment. Much of “Snuff Queen’s” inauthenticity garb comes from the acting that’s densely overplayed and exaggerated because of the less-comedic directive by shot-calling distributors and performances stand out amongst a darker theme as too watery and less potent, like off-brand prescription drugs. Ironically enough, IMDB.com gives in the title’s controversial nature by not listing the film under any of the actor’s individual credits as to say or allure “Snuff Queen” documentary as real evidence and content based. Tuesday Knight (“A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master”), Josie Hung (“Staycation”), Gina DeFlilippo, Captain Dare, Zac Mendoza, Neill Flemming (“It Kills at Midnight”), Christopher Parker (“Spider”) and Jake Holley costar.

Much of what is laid out in “Snuff Queen,” all the provocative and debatable ethics, legality, and portentous aspects of Snuff, is all a load of crap and the director, Sean Russell, would be the first person to tell you that. What Russell intends to convey is an allegorical emotional evaporation in adult entertainment performers and how apathetic the industry is toward the safety and responsibility for its talent who battle with low self-esteem and anger issues that either drive wedges between friend and family or ensue verbal spouts. There’s also the treatment or being seen as just a bag of meat for the slaughter when getting the shot is important than the person taking all the risk for little reward. Russell achieves that endgame message despite the cuts of levity humor that do squeeze through every so often but with that squeeze-in of a dark humor chuckle, coincided with a reserved approach to a documentary surrounding Snuff of all things extreme, in lies an off-putting characteristic going against the grain of the film’s black toned nature and Russell’s indelicate undercurrent theme. “Snuff Queen” is nowhere near the shock level its required to have, especially being bestowed a taboo title, with little-no-effort in the thickness of the story’s creative girth; instead, the 2008 interviews, snipped scenes from previous controversial films, and one atypical scene at the heart of the story teases with stark nudity and blood are the only edgier content of a rather dull feature length pseudo-documentary.

Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, Dark Arts Entertainment distributes the home release of “Snuff Queen” on DVD. The MPEG2, 720p and 1080p, DVD9 has stark grade resolutions due to the 2008 recorded interviews and footage shoot 15-years later in 2023 with the former a blockier, less-pixelated digital camcorder for ease of AVN, working the crowd, person-to-person use. Recent footage has the polished look of a high-dollar digital recording sans any artistic grading or stylistic lens. No issues with compression codec that produces a very fine, detailed image reproduction that sinks into inky blacks and retains a natural color palette. “Snuff Queen” is authored with a LPCM English stereo mix that’s an imitation of a hot mic of continuous dialogue, as many real, pseudo, and mock documentaries are, that renders cleanly through from one bookend to the other. There’s also not a ton of interference other than in the 2008 interviews at the AVN with perhaps more commercial equipment or audio setup. The onboard mic snags the milieu sounds with the raw range and depth. English subtitles are available. Encoded special features include a director’s commentary that goes through the first planned steps for the film and its subsequent rejections from producers back in 2008, deleted scenes, and the film’s trailer. Physical features are stark and spartan with a convention DVD Amaray that has a mock polaroid border and the redacted eyes and mouth of a faceless, chest high naked woman that draws attention in conjunction with the title. Dark Arts Entertainment presents the release not rated, region free, and has a runtime of 92 minutes.

Last Rites: “Snuff Queen” might have worked 15-years ago with the old footage that contained real pornstars and real enough gore effects that could have turned this concept onto a creative machination in illusion of the truth or a clever black comedy that really pokes the porn industry in the ribs, but instead time and too many hands the creative pot has relinquished any power “Snuff Queen” may have wielded, dethroning it definitly out of shock contention.

“Snuff Queen” on DVD from Dark Arts Entertainment!

Fixing the Tracking on Those EVIL VHS Cassettes! “Snuff Tapes” reviewed! (MVDVisual / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on June 14, 2022

Ready to be Recorded? “Snuff Tapes” now available at Amazon.com!

Marcela Arkaino investigates a Talca, Chile rapist and murder who has been drugging and abducting women for years to record aberrant tapes of his cruel exploits. Marcela takes a special eager interest in this particular assignment as she was one of those unfortunate women. As a silver lining out of an extremely bad situation, she is one of three women left alive by her brutal sex-sadist aggressor. As the reporter in her garners the difficult stories from the other two survivors, Cataline and Jesus, abused by the same masked man, she inches closer to his whereabouts by triangulating attacks and connecting similarities but her scouring of roadside market, unlabeled VHS tapes became the smoking gun needle in a haystack that produces not just any depraved tape of his victims but of her own ordeal, turning now an inch into a mile in finding him. Bring the other two women into the fold, Marcela devises a plan of revenge to direct a snuff film of her own, starring their rapist and torturer.

Hailing from Talca, Chile, the same location where the story is set, comes the shock-slamming, VHS-inspired thriller “Snuff Tapes,” aka “Cintas Tapes,” from the Chilean born independent filmmaker, Vito Garcia Viedma. The writer-director’s prior two zombie-influenced short films, the 2012 “Bajo el sonido del tren” and the 2017 “Escape from Zombie City,” along with the criminal underbelly 2017 feature, Los culpables,” displays a course change deviation that wouldn’t prepare the average Viedma film fan for his 2020 venture into the dark underworld exploitation of indie snuff. While the title highlights the concept around videotaping the misuse of a person’s trust and vulnerability for one’s own disturbing profit, in this case to get one’s jolly’s off, much of Viedma’s story skirts around the edge with just mentioning the nixing of captured and consumed of vivacity women, saving the story’s climax for more detailed death dealing in a vengeful perspective rather than a videotaped one. “Snuff Tapes” is created under Viedma’s ZineFilms production company in association with Cabro Chico and Trippas Productions.

“Snuff Tapes” is no “8MM” with a mega-Hollywood budget and Nic Cage doing Nic Cage antics. “Snuff Tapes” is no “Effects” with cult icons Joseph Pilato and Tom Savini helming sordid scenes from fantasy to non-fiction. “Snuff Tapes” isn’t even on the same level as “A Serbian Film” and, to be honest, I don’t think any film anytime soon will ever be on the same level as that twisted picture. What all three of those successful and notorious films have in common and what Viedma lacks in separating itself from the rest are in two very important details: a budget and an array of talent. Viedma’s film humbles in comparison with not only a microbudget but also in a cast makeup of essentially five actors with withering substance. Valentina Soto Albornoz stars as the retribution-reporter, Cataline Ibarra, who for the last decade has been piecing together clues of her kidnapper’s whereabouts by purchasing random video cassettes tapes from Talca street vendors and when Ibarra strikes gold unearthing her own ugly tape, she understandably feels overwhelmed reliving visually the nightmare and subsequently gravitates toward being hellbent for revenge. Ibarra recruits her survivor carbon copies in the tattooed Jesus Mayano (Camila Medina) and aspiring photography model Marcela Arkaino (Camila Carreno Arancibia) for a little payback, but Ibarra, aside from her good friend Esteban (Hugo Villar) providing her a PAL encoded VHS player and rewatching her tape to catch clues missed, she virtually does all the legwork in pinpointing the one responsible, drugging him, abducting him, and committing herself to the nitty-gritty, fantasy plan for whenever she got her hands on him. I’m not sure what roles or business Arkaino or Mayano actually had to just stand there moping other than maybe bear witness to the end of their lifelong torment, to see the boogeyman parish once and for all? Reinaldo Aravena plays the man behind the mask who initially puts up a strong showing as the camera operator and stud of his homemade videos but then quickly fizzles disappointingly on the opposite side of the camera due to a lack of scaled down combating in what becomes just a one-woman show without much to show for it.

Viedma paves an interesting structural path for his film, taking the audience an extended 36-minute introduction of voiced over VHS recordings of survivor stories before entering opening credits to what then becomes a dichotomy narrative between backstory and present day. This also speaks to the visual cinematography as well that jumps back and forth between being shot on the VHS’s boxed-in format (found footage) to a wider lens of the digital world, capturing past and present in two distinct formats as well as capturing the past that isn’t glossy, pretty, and is an inescapable prison where the walls, the horizontal pillars, are closing in on the world. Appearances, no matter how apt to the subject, do not give the movie soul and “Snuff Tapes” misses that poignant shock value target with poorly written characters and a misaligned connect-the-dots investigation that doesn’t make much sense. Ibarra examination of the evidence, or really lack thereof, points to one man, but like a cheating slacker in high school, she does not show her work to come up with that result. Instead, she repeats, at least in a couple of instances, her gut knows she has the right man. In Viedma’s world, a gut feeling is factual evidence for stringing someone up to face judgement. In reality, that’s a severe boo-boo case of miscalculation that would get you jail time. Circumstantial street justice on little-to-no proof separates the empathy from what an audience is supposed feel fired up against an unspoken truth and gives them satisfaction in a just cause to see the obliteration of scum from the face of the Earth. In the first half, “Snuff Tapes” is undeniably graphic and cuts deep with a veridical, degenerate villain, but falters with a lazy second half approach and gratuitous revenge.

MVD Visual in association with Danse Macabre and Jinga Films release “Snuff Tapes” on a North American DVD release. The region free DVD is presented in a VHS format of 1.33:1 when looking cassette camera lens with the rest of the film in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. As expected, the VHS quality has semblance of overuse and age with a fuzzy display and muted, boxy sound. Outside of that, the picture quality is not much better in reconstituting a playback on lower end of the DVD spectrum – approx. 3-5 Mbps. Compression artefacts are heavily present with poor clarity around the edging and blacks shimmer and appear blotchy. The lossy Spanish language Dolby Digtial 5.1 Surround Sound loses some of it’s fidelity in the compression but is the overall highlight amongst the DVD’s A/V scorecard; however, the subtitle transcription is the worst I’ve seen in quite some time with duplicated segments, spelling errors, and a timing that equates to a microsecond blip of dialogue on some occasions. The release comes with another version of the film as the sole bonus feature with an entire VHS 1.33:1 (4:3) VHS Cut for an immersive effect. As always, snuff features can be difficult to digest but they are becoming more and more prevalent and popular in a highly accessible home video market and director, Vito Garcia Viedma, tries his creative hand at creating disturbing content only to defile the genre with a subpar entry sullied by deficient storytelling.

Ready to be Recorded? “Snuff Tapes” now available at Amazon.com!

Evil Wants To Profit From Your Death! “Red Room” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on May 16, 2019

When Kyra awakes inside an unadorned room of the second floor of an isolated farm house, the woman, who last remembers herself walking to her car from an afterhours night club, finds her wrists and ankles bound together alongside two other women. The women, Lilly and Allison, have been locked inside the room for days, kidnapped the same way, and treated with an inhumane care that more-or-less maintains their physical beauty. Uncertainty questions their fates, but one thing is for sure, when their captors come to remove you from the others, like selected head amongst the cattle, and relocate you to the red room, that’s when the screaming starts and you’re never heard from again. Between the three captives, anger and fear struggle for common ground on a plan of desperate escape and with the iron grip of their abductors honed into their every move, Kyra’s determination to escape breeds sturdier when the possibility of death is more than likely imminent, but before their inevitable snuff, the red room holds sickening world-wide pleasures that anticipates their particular company.

Poised to be callously unsettling and keen to rip apart compassionate souls, “Red Room” hails from Ireland as a ghastly and shocking exploitation thriller from writer-director Stephen Gaffney. A production of Gaffney’s Deep Web Films and co-written with Erica Keegan, “Red Room” slides ever so covertly into the internet’s interlining of unspoken grisliness that exploits people for the darker desires of other people and Gaffney runs through the typical rational of the irrational abductions, such as sex trafficking, and though that’s certainly taboo enough to quench viewers with a powerful story in itself, the director taps a sex and death geyser a few filmmakers have reaped, perhaps more so retrospectively, the machiavellian benefits in finding a home in a rather thin genre with films that are akin to the plot, including works of malevolent personal satisfaction as such as in Dusty Nelson’s “Effects” or the investigated side that encompasses the snuff world in Joel Schumacher’s “8mm” starring Nicholas Cage.

The 2017 film thrills to inflict tortuous anticipation for what lies ahead of the tethered three women. Amy Kelly’s Kyra is the only colleen to be shown physically abducted and while Kelly maintains a fine performance as the strong female protagonist with no-choice-but-to-escape attitude, Kyra’s character arc has a confounding impact where Gaffney involves non-linear scenes into the story, providing the events leading up to her abduction and also other more linear scenes with her mother on the phone with the police irate with her disappearance, but none of those scenes had significant impact to Kyra’s predicament or motivation and felt out of place. Kyra doesn’t necessarily talk about her child much either, which is always a powerful motivator for anyone with a need to live. Instead of carrying on with Kyra’s needless background, Richard, played by John D’Alessandro, could have benefited from the excess framework capacity of how he became groomed by his stern father, a role fit for a cruel king by “Game of Thrones'” Brian Fortune, and how his calm, sensible, and business casual character admixed himself with various complex villainy, roles donned by JP Albuquerque and Rodrigo Ternevoy, and how they became a triad of high end brunette liquidators of sorts. The other two women with Kyra, Alison (Saoirse Doyle) and Lilly (Sohaila Lindheim) spread the reactionary affects in a petrified Alison and a realist in Lilly when contrasted to Kyra’s defiance, but Alison carries the crux of the story, the reason why there is a story, that falls right smack dab in the red room and, frankly, she becomes the star of the gritty show. “Red Room’s” tops out the cast with another “Game of Thrones'” star Eddie Jackson and Fiona Twamley Hewitt.

“Red Room” has been compared to “Hostel” with a plot that does walk a familiar path of a pay-to-die morbidity and that comparison is a fair assessment with the ancillary connotation that “Red Room” could be seen as an extension or a byproduct of Eli Roth’s sadist of a film. However, a microscopic obstacle provides just enough to dispute that claim, to whither back a formidable opponent in the game of who has the most visceral body of work, and that evidence lies in Gaffney’s creative style. The filmmaker, for lack of a better term, pulls punches, not delivering the full on aggression required to provoke and stimulate the masses. The scenes of gore are ghastly to a point and that’s not necessarily the issue that’s more so with the unravelling of their inhuman nature that doesn’t genuinely denote a persuasive emanation of their victims damnation. We see a little of spark with JP Alburquerque’s Andras who is clearly insane with an limitless immoral conscious whereas the others teeter about more of the business margins or struggle with a tough guy image.

From Stephan Gaffney’s Deep Wed Films in association with Sicario Pictures enters “Red Room” onto DVD home video from Breaking Glass Pictures. Presented in a widescreen, 2.35:1 aspect ratio, on a one-sided, doubled layered DVD9, the Canon C300 Mark II digitally shot feature cleanly and sharply provides quality throughout that falters occasionally with some choppy video speed controlling in the more extreme scenes. Color palette isn’t lush with brilliant hues, but with the darker tone of the film, the expectation of vividness lies more so with graphic content and adds to the value. The English language Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix is meaty and balanced, strong enough to even tune uneducated ears to the Irish accents. The dialogue is rightfully upfront with fine range and depth with no issues on mic placements. Bonus features include a short and sweet radio interview with director Stephen Gaffney, cast interviews, test screen reaction with the finale climax, a director’s audio commentary, a single deleted scene, and a concept promo. Ireland makes a play for extreme horror with Stephen Gaffney’s “Red Room,” a twisted and a humanly fathomable thriller with a cold-hearted gape at the worst of human nature that lingers into the vast virtual and essential disconnect amongst online gawkers that will never face the exploitive repercussions of what wets their appetites as they sit behind computer screens.