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