Artsploitation Blu-ray Releases: Snowflake (2017) Reviewed




Grindhouse films can be wild and exhilarating rides, if done right. The Tarantino-Rodriguez mashup of Planet Terror and Death Proof proved as an effective ode to the long thought lost genre, but many other exploitation films of this caliber have tried, yet failed, to be modern successors for this niche genre. Snowflake, a German entry in this series of low-budget independent efforts, thinks outside the box at times, trying its hardest to be a smart and funny effort that sometimes can get lost in its own weirdness without a proper kind of satisfactory ending to its unending insanity.

At times, it’s almost weird just for the sake of it. Two murderers find a screenplay in the back of their car that describes what they just accomplished in great detail, much to their surprise and confusion, and as they continue reading on, they find that it details their future path right down to the very words they end up uttering. It’s a strange sort of ordeal- characters show up quite literally out of nowhere and take the story into completely random directions, which offers some kind of unpredictable fun, but is it really greater than the sum of its parts?



I couldn’t even begin to try to explain the rest of the plot if I wanted to. It’s the kind of film that’s best to go into blind, because the cover art and posters you’ll find for this film do not really give the story any justice or clues as to what’s really going on. It’s a clever take- almost a more violent take on Stranger than Fiction- but, more often than not, its tales are disjointed and rarely come together to form a more cohesive narrative. That may have been what director Adolfo J. Komerer and guest director William James had been going for in their wonderfully weird and wild tale, but from a thematic standpoint, it’s a mess.

That’s not to say it’s not a fun film, though: I had an absolute blast watching Snowflake, which surprisingly I had never heard of before recently. “There’s a gangbang in hell, and your ass is the main entrance” is my new favorite one-liner. It’s a fun little exploitation film that does well when it doesn’t try to take itself too seriously. It’s one of those movies you’ll have to see once just for the experience and then may never end up picking up again, or might want to show a friend who’s never seen it before, just to see their reaction.


-Wes Ball