Snuffet (2014)
Helmut is a frog mask-wearing internet personality. He operates an online forum called The Flame which is dedicated to sharing his radical beliefs on a very special subject with like-minded people. The subject? Puppet civil rights and it's downfall. The Flame believes that puppets are disgracing humanity by intermixing with human society and will stop at nothing to rid the world of their impurity. Helmut and his new recruit, Melissa, share footage of them abducting, torturing, and murdering puppets for the good of their cause. Snuffet is a collection of their Flame video diaries and private home videos. I think I sort of get this movie, but I'm not sure if I liked it.
A melodramatic mission statement from Helmut, a puppet tied to a chair, and a lengthy autopsy get things off to a slow start, and I began to fear this was to be a long 53 minutes. Fortunately some puppet-on-human porn, graphic simulated Helmut sex, and gory puppet slaughter brought it back to life. As a casual fan of director Dustin Wayde Mills, I came into Snuffet with modest expectations, simply hoping for an absurd faux snuff parody. To be sure, it is absurd and does spoof the whole found footage/torture porn thing in an interesting way. However, the close parallel Snuffet draws to the very real attitudes out there concerning racism and homophobia sobers the fun down a smidge, though not without adding some unexpected depth to itself. But then one realizes it's a puppet movie, and feels silly.
The puppets featured in this film are of your standard plush variety (think if Fraggle Rock resembled humans) and are very cute. Some are adults, some are children, some are elderly. You almost don't want them eviscerated. Helmut and Melissa do a great job coming across as menacing and psychotic, and their frog and pig masks, respectively, are a clever touch. There is some convincing acting coming through Melissa's character, but the frog mask stays on for Helmut, which is a shame because he would have been the most expressive character in the film. There are also a couple of human victims of equal acting ability; one gets naked, one does not. No one here is any Alf, but they do their best.
Snuffet is an ultra-low budget movie. With simple and few locations, bare minimum personnel, and a small scope, this looks like it was made quickly and easily. It goes mostly without a musical score, and the effects are just enough to get the nasty job done. The picture looks cleaner and sharper than the average faux snuff flick, but the camerawork does not fail to include the subgenre's trademark unfocused zooms and shaky movements (you know, to give it that totally real look). Often times the puppets find themselves on top of (or crucified to) cardboard boxes that are concealing their puppeteers, but some scenes have smoke-and-mirrors trickery that conceals the puppeteer out of mind as well and end up being most effective. The novelty and context of the film help to forgive any other technical shortcomings one of this level can be guilty of.
Definitely not the best puppet movie of the year, Snuffet is a weird pill to swallow. So far my favorite film from director Mills has been Night of the Tentacles, and I maintain that it's the film for any newcomer to start with. Snuffet is like that one to check out when you're five films deep into this man's work, if you're still interested by then. Mills seems to average three or four films a year, all totally different from each other. So I'm absolutely still interested. -N. Weaver