Grindhouse Theater: Snuff (1975)

Deep in South America, a Manson-esque cult leader named Satan cavorts with his bevy of beautiful biker chick followers while compelling them to kill in his name. When sexy American actress Terry London arrives with producer Max Marsh to shoot a movie there, the hippie biker cult targets her and her friends with plans of murder, mayhem and the grisly sacrifice of her unborn baby.

The film is most notorious for being marketed as if it were an actual snuff film. It contributed to the urban legend of snuff films, although the concept did not originate with it.

The film started out as a low-budget gore film titled Slaughter which was written and directed by the husband and wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay. It was filmed in Argentina in 1971 on a budget of $30,000 and depicted the actions of a Manson-esque murder cult, filmed mainly in silence due to the actors understanding very little English.

Independent low-budget distributor/producer Allan Shackleton took the film and shelved it for four years - but was inspired to release it with a new ending, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers, after reading a newspaper article in 1975 on the rumor of snuff films produced in South America and decided to cash in on the urban legend. He added a new ending, filmed in a vérité style by Simon Nuchtern, in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter. The new footage purportedly showed an actual murder, and was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline "The film that could only be made in South America...where Life is CHEAP".

Once the film was released, Shackleton reportedly hired fake protesters to picket movie theaters showing the film. This soon became moot when Women Against Pornography began staging real protests, outraged at the film's purported imagery of sexual violence. The group's protest received coverage by such media outlets as the CBS Evening News.

The film was included on the Video Nasties list.

grind

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid 1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.