The Day After Halloween (1979)

Genres - Mystery  |   Sub-Genres - Psychological Thriller  |   Run Time - 90 min.  |   Countries - Australia  |   MPAA Rating - R
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Review by Nathan Southern

With its premise of a young fashion model terrorized by crazies, this subpar Aussie thriller from director Simon Wincer and scribes the DeRoche Brothers reads like a cross between Lamont Johnson's Lipstick and John Carpenter's Halloween; in fact, Snapshot was rather desperately retitled "The Day After Halloween" in some markets to try to capitalize on the runaway success of the Carpenter film. To the movie's credit, it never goes for the all-out sleaze of Lipstick. But unfortunately, it also lacks the suspense and finesse of the Carpenter. Marketing ploys aside, the DeRoches' main influence as scriptwriters was actually Alfred Hitchcock, who they spent their early years attempting to ape . In the 1981 sleeper Road Games (written solely by Everett DeRoche), the Hitchcock homages work beautifully; Snapshot, though, is so devoid of any tension that it feels closer to limp, B-grade melodrama than an actual nail-biter. The huge holes in narrative logic don't help matters either; we wonder, for instance, why heroine Angela (Sigrid Thornton) fails to phone the police when her mother steals her savings, and why - when she discovers that her life is at risk - she stupidly flees to the office of a pervert (Robert Bruning) who has already attempted to seduce her. Angela is literally the only noble character in the picture; everyone else here is either a sadist, a psycho, a thief, a liar, or some combination of the above, and the uniformity of that posturing destroys this film's credibility. And whose idea was it to give sexy 19-year-old Angela an ex-boyfriend who is a fat, burnt-out middle-aged dope? That'll be the day. There are a couple of creepy moments, including the bizarre calling card left by a stalker, and wide-eyed Thornton (so appealing in The Man From Snowy River) looks incredible in her topless modeling scenes. Otherwise, Snapshot is a real dog. The kitschy 70s soundtrack tunes (two performed by the Little River Band-soundalike group Sherbet) also date this film terribly.