I Love Snuff

Every once in a while, it is important to take a break from static arthouse films and important cult movies and watch a film so ridiculously revolting, aesthetically primitive, morally retarding, and patently pointless that it puts things into perspective in regard to how endlessly entertaining, innately idiotic, and mindlessly assembled scat films can be and the very un-French French work I Love Snuff (1995)—a film about an impotent man who achieves sexual ecstasy after receiving ransom videos of his black wife being tortured by two alpha-degenerates—is certainly such an amusingly appalling vice-ridden video affair. Co-directed, co-scripted, and co-starring (although I doubt a physical script was ever written) Jean-Louis Costes, a nasty noise musician and putrid performance artist oftentimes described as the “French GG Allin” due to his proclivity towards playing with poop and piss, shoving Barbie dolls up his already ripped rectum, and mutilating his genitals on stage via box cutter, I Love Snuff is no less deranged and debauched as a penetrating piece of anti-aesthetic/anti-erotic video art that could have been directed by Beavis and Butthead’s slightly more cultivated frog cousin. While the man who he is oftentimes compared to, GG Allin, absurdly thought of himself as a sort of ‘Rock N Roll Messiah’ (his real-life birth name was Jesus Christ Allin), in reality he was a totally artistically untalented megalomaniac junky who would be better described as the last great American slapstick comedian who turned fecal-flinging into an apocalyptic art form and comedy routine and I see Jean-Louis Costes in a similarly unintentionally entertaining light, although I suspect he is more conscious of his behavior than his belated American spiritual brother. Making cameo appearances in libertine European arthouse films like Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) as a deleteriously deranged fist-fuck-loving faggot in a sick sodomite S&M bar, as well as Edwin Brienen’s Lebenspornografie (2003) aka Berlin Nights: Grand Delusions as a poop-loving poof pornstar, Costes' own movies are innately less artistic and can hardly be described as serious, but they are indubitably all the more recklessly wanton and warped in their themes and visuals. Describing his own no-budget shot-on-video auteur works as “just stupid films” and his directing technique as follows, “I write a scenario and that’s it. There are some where I’m drunk, I switch on the camera, and I talk absolute nonsense,” I Love Snuff looks like an amateur anti-pornography experiment shot over a couple hours in some multicultural sewer in Paris, yet it manages to consistently captivate in its bottom-of-the-barrel visceral vulgarity and vice-venerating technical ineptitude as the sort of work that was clearly assembled by a man with a lot of unhinged passion, but not much sanity and intellectual sophistication. Featuring a dress-wearing degenerate defecating in the middle of the street in public, a man passively taking a tampon and a strap-on dildo in his blatantly bulging bunghole, a white woman in full-body blackface (labia included) magically turning into an authentic Negro as the film progresses, a white wuss torturing a black broad via Dijon mustard and French fries, and an impotent man achieving sexual climax at the climax his wife’s death, among various other case examples of philistine Psychopathia Sexualis, I Love Snuff is like German auteur Peter Fleischmann’s porn-parody Dorothea's Revenge (1974) aka Dorothea's Rache except actually funny and without artistic pretense. 

 “Le branleur impuissant” aka “The Impotent Wanker” (Pascal Keller), who not has fucked “in ages” and whose penis is more flaccid than the excessive flabby skin hanging off an elderly woman’s arm, is in the proper position to make love with his African queen of a wife Rose (played by “Rose”), but, rather unfortunately, he has the sexual virility of an East Indian eunuch, so naturally he cannot rise to the occasion and complete his husbandly duties and he throws his sexually frustrated spouse of their flat and later unrealistically dreams of having a magic Johnson with a humungous shaft and a human-sized human head as his dickhead. Meanwhile, a female pimp of a BDSM bitch that goes by the cliché name Mistress (Anne van der Linden) is walking around her cuckold boy toy, who describes himself as “just a turd,” like a dog on a leash. Taking on the groveling role of a subservient canine, the man, who is also wearing a dress, bends over and defecates out what seems to be at least four feet worth of real fecal matter and proceeds to blow a student for fast cash not long after, but the jack-off John runs away without paying him and then, to make a bad day all the more worse, he is immediately raped by a long-haired degenerate. Since the Mistress and her cuck canine cannot pay their bills, it is the bitch beta-males job to “sell his ass to queers,” but thankfully a more rewarding and racially-charged way to earn quick cash randomly arrives in the form of a disgruntled wife. It must be these two predatory perverts' lucky day as they run into the Impotent Wanker’s sad spouse Rose and proceed to kidnap her, humiliate and molest her, and take her home and lock her in their basement dungeon as their very own personal plaything/hostage/slave. They call the Impotent Wanker and demand that he pay a hefty ransom of 10,000.00 francs or they will kill Rose and to prove they are deathly serious, they decide to send homemade torture videos of his babe being belligerently brutalized. Unfortunately for the victim and victimizers, the Impotent Wanker is rather amazed to learn that he finds himself absolutely aroused by these crude videos of his wife being physically and sexually violated. Giving new meaning to the French phrase “La petite mort” (“The Little Death”), the Little Wanker is finally able to bust his load to the point of his own gentlemen’s relish covering his entire face, but it comes at the seemingly worthless price of his wife’s life. In the end, a black woman suffers Dijon mustard, clotheslines and a fork to the nipple, hot French fries to her unclad body, semen to the chest, and eventual death-by-degenerate because her hubby has the sexual stamina of Michael Jackson.  Of course, the sickest scene in I Love Snuff is saved for the very conclusion, which features a pretty and wholesome rose flower blowing in the wind, thus paying tribute to sexually unsatisfied wife and snuff victim Rose, another black victim of the hopelessly xenophiliac French people.

 Sort of like Story of O and the Marquis de Sade meets early John Waters and Troma in a pre-apocalyptic postcolonial French slum, I Love Snuff is the film that jaded Judaic frog Serge Gainsbourg never had the gall to make, but apparently kraut arthouse-splatter auteur Marian Dora (Cannibal, Melancholie der Engel aka The Angel's Melancholia) because he is supposedly currently working on a remake of Jean-Louis Costes’ carelessly crude camcorder experiment. Of course, considering Dora’s rather severe and unflinching seriousness, it is very doubtful that his Teutonic take on I Love Snuff will contain the same ‘campy’ comedy value as Costes' work. Indeed, if nothing else, I Love Snuff works best as an intrinsically intemperate sadomasochistic black comedy that is so ceaselessly over-the-top that no one can take it even remotely seriously, even if it does feature real unsimulated depictions of a seeming insane pervert shoving stuff in and out his rather rancid rectum. While I Love Snuff will do nothing to strength your faith in humanity, it will give you a deeper respect for the biological comedy act that is the human body. While I cannot agree with Gaspard Noé's puffery-plagued remark that “Costes is the French Pasolini,” he at least deserves to be described as the frog GG Allin, which, considering the patent pretentiousness of the French and their supposed love of high kultur, is no small accomplishment. In I Love Snuff, Costes defecates in the street while wearing an ugly dress, is orally and anally penetrated by a sadistic Madame with a strap-on and then guzzles a couple gallons of said woman’s piss like a champ cuck, and has a steamy and sleazy one-sided love affair with a black slave in bondage, among various other forms of self-debasing behavior that the average normal man would not do even if he were demanded to at gun point, thus making the Franco-libertine a sort of flagrantly politically incorrect postmodern sideshow freak of sorts with a deep and unwavering metaphysical masochism, which I am surprised is not all the more rampant in a country like France (or virtually any other postcolonial European nation) where collective guilt and ethno-masochism, xenophilia, sexual aberration, gynocentric feminism, and all-encompassing worship of every and anything that is weak, ugly, and historically persecuted and reviled has been put on a kosher pedestal and is now worshiped as the height of moral superiority. With such slavery-morality-sanctifying swill dominating every aspect of Western life and culture, the only thing one can do at the end of the day is laugh and just wait for the world to burn, and Costes’ I Love Snuff certainly has a gas chamber worth of laughs, but be forewarned that such a strikingly sick work might rot your soul and/our cause you to piss your pants laughing. 

-Ty E