Massacres (1991)
Directed by Jean-Claude Roy

Film Review

With Massacres, maverick director Jean-Claude Roy had the opportunity to combine the two mainstays of his filmmaking career - gritty thriller and lurid pornography - and whilst the film has very little to commend itself artistically it does provide a sobering reflection on the moral vacuity of the early 1990s, not just in cinema, but in society in general.  Snuff movies, an extreme form of sadistic pornography in which the individual being filmed is killed for real in the course of the film, were a gruesome reality of the time, but it is hard to know whether Roy is condemning this phenomenon or exploiting it for cynical advantage.  (The fact that Roy was an exploitation merchant hardly mitigates in his favour.)

Certainly, the scenes in which the peep show girls are attacked, humiliated and then brutally slain (the most shocking being via electrocution in a trough of water) are hard to stomach.  (By contrast, some of the other killings appear ludicrously comical.)  You wonder what possessed actors of the calibre of Charley Boorman and Pierre Clémenti to lend their time, let alone their talents, to this ill-conceived deluge of bad taste.  After a promising beginning, the film goes down hill at a phenomenal pace once the action has shifted from Paris to Seoul (or rather, Paris masquerading as Seoul), and, once stuck in the cliché-sodden mire of depravity, it continues to sicken, as much with its sordid subject matter as with the sheer, unbelievable amateurishness of its production.

Film Synopsis

To clear his gambling debts, a young psychopath named Ronny agrees to deliver a suitcase to Seoul, not realising that the suitcase contains plates for printing forged banknotes.  Whilst pursued by a police inspector Verdier, Ronny is drawn into making amateur films in which peep show girls are exploited before being subject to an agonising death.