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am not certain about the cultural prevalence of
snuff films in countries outside the
U.S.
, but I am
rather certain that, even in this debauched land,
snuff remains a seedy underground taboo which
rarely, if ever, pokes its horrific organs through
a hernia in the mainstream. Sure, you and your
black metal friends may have watched with sadistic
curiosity some sketchy clips online when your
parents were sleeping; you may have even stumbled
across the film "8mm" or maybe you are
just a fan of Nine Inch Nails and their early
snuff-y videos. But snuff has not reached
household name status and probably won't unless
Lindsay Lohan becomes the star of one.
And with that off color
comment, let's introduce the British film
"Footsteps", which was written and
directed by G.H. Evans. Oh, but first, the
essentials of snuff. Basically, snuff films are
the exponential extreme of pornography; girls, and
I assume guys as well, are shown in sexual
situations and then one of them is brutally killed
to satisfy either the whims of some Patrick
Bateman-type rich sicko whose indefatigable bank
account has put him in states of perpetual ennui,
or your average burgeoning psycho-path doubling as
an average person. "8mm" made it seem as
if snuff films are not made for mass consumption,
but rather the idiosyncratic tastes of those
customers who specially commission the work.
"Footsteps"
chronicles the footsteps a young man named Andrew
(Nicholas Bool) takes to enter the guttural hell
of a local snuff ring. Andrew is just a working
man: he spends his days toiling with monotony in a
factory and his nights feigning interest while his
live-in girlfriend makes love to him. Something
fatally tragic has happened to both of his
parents, the details are not explicitly given, and
the last muscle of meaning and hope is slipping
from his life as his best friend lies critical in
a hospital bed from the severe torture he endured
at the hands of the snuff people.
Most of these introductory
details and vital strains of plot info are
presented sans direct dialogue; the director,
rather, chops up melancholy and bloody scenes in a
very coherent order with the industrial edged
soundtrack speaking for Andrew's bi-polar jaded
angst. A reoccurring theme of Picasso "blue
period" blue lights are also used frequently
over silent scenes, adding a lugubrious
uncertainty that makes up for the film's few set
changes. And just when you have pieced together
Andrew's life circumstances, they disintegrate
like he was shoved into a centrifuge. His boss
lays him off, his woman leaves him, and his
hospitalized friend may wake up from a coma
paralyzed. And thus, his sociopathic side is
awakened.
For an independent film which
appears to have been made on a humble budget, the
gore and realistic bodily carnage which demarcates
"Footsteps'" turning point are executed
with a shocking -- "you'll be uncontrollably
replaying the scene where the dude gets a knife
jabbed into his throat, then sliced through his
vocal cords until he gags atrociously and dies,
for the next two days" -- brilliance.
With a dark turn of
coincidence, Andrew stumbles across his estranged
girlfriend in a bar flirting with another guy,
right after Andrew has just beaten the shit out of
a different guy in the bathroom. The guy from the
bathroom comes back to interrupt this awkward
moment and Andrew again beats him, this time
enough to warrant reconstructive surgery, before
he himself is thrown into an alley and roughed up
by security. With Andrew bloody and half-conscious
in the alley, a nameless man wielding a camcorder
starts ordering around his partner to kill Andrew
with a pipe. Camcorder man's partner doesn't have
the heart to eliminate Andrew and, in a moment of
true tact, camcorder man recruits Andrew to join
the team.
From here, Andrew meets snuff
lackey Paul (Mads Koudal), whose job is to kidnap
his company's movie stars and then get rid of any
body parts of theirs that remain after shooting
wraps. Paul also seems to be a domineering pimp or
crack dealer, but that is again left for the
viewer to figure out. Andrew then becomes a part
of the twisted group who left his friend for dead,
and is left with the choice between reestablishing
his conscience and eradicating it for good.
"Footsteps" is a
very well-made indie psych/horror film which
deserves much merit, for it can easily compete
with its peers which are disseminated from major
studios with astronomical budgets every other
week. The acting in "Footsteps" is
subtle and never overdone, and the writing is
vague but efficacious and never banal. My only
personal admonishment for the film concerns the
soundtrack. While the music fits the subject
matter perfectly, most of the pieces are
derivative in a very conspicuous way. One of the
last songs in the film is the exact replica of the
second to last song off of Nine Inch Nails
"The Fragile", but the credits don't say
Trent Reznor, they instead say Graham Hellis.
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