More Whacky Fun with Snuff Flicks: Thesis(Tesis) and Mute Witness!

The funny thing is, I know exactly who is to blame for this whole thing.   It’s a dirty hippy named Ed Saunders.  He was the singer in a 60’s band called The Fugs, but this is not his work with the Fugs which I’m talking about.  Ed Saunders wrote a book on the Manson Family killings called The Family that was full of factual errors for which his publisher was sued successfully.  But there is one enduring contribution to our culture that is still at work.  That is far as I’ve ever heard or read of, The Family is the first place in which the unconfirmed rumor of the “snuff flick” originated.  Blogging about the subject and the numerous films that have incorporated the myth as a plot device has become a dull chore for me but it is a necessary evil because of the huge number of hits such reviews get.  I’ve gone through a lot of these silly movies.  Emanuelle in America is the one that’s kind of a European soft core film, A Serbian Film is the really extreme one,  Cheap is the one where the guy had good idea but no money, The Last House on Dead End Street is the one that is impossible to find, etc.   Then now, I’m down two these last two that I’ve run across which are better described as thrillers than horror movies from back in the 90’s.  One is the Spanish film Thesis or Tesis the other is a film called Mute Witness which is a US film shot in Russia.  These films are both good but not great.  I found them both for about ten bucks combined, so no great loss or win on that one.  They both have film geek types as characters and are semi self-referential, i.e. sort of films about film.   Thesis is about a film student who uncovers a snuff film operation on campus.  I don’t feel like giving a full plot synopsis because I’m lazy and sick of these films.    If you’re looking for hardcore degenerate kind of material or real snuff films, I’m sure Thesis will bore you.   It’s like the Saved by the Bell of the snuff film mythology.  There is some attempt to comment or observe about society and medias fixation with violence in it, but it is sort of just thrown out there in a very superficial manner.  I prefer Mute Witness which is about a mute woman working on a low budget horror film in Moscow who witnesses some Russian mob stuff involving snuff flicks.  This is not because Mute Witness is a brilliant film, but rather because the actress that plays the mute woman looked pretty sexy getting into a bath in the film.

Actually, Mute Witness is a little on the cutesy side.  That’s kind of like Saved by the Bell snuff flick action to!