Death Of A Snowman

Death of a Snowman (1976)

Runtime: 88 minutes

Directed by: Christopher Rowley

Starring: Nigel Davenport, Ken Gampu, Madala Mphahlele, Peter Dyneley

From: Martin Wragge Productions

Here's another entry where most of the text is from Letterboxd. Here's a movie (from South Africa, of all places) known by several titles but it's now best known by that title, which is the name of a character in the film so the title is a spoiler. Now, the rest of the text is from Letterboxd. I'll be back later tonight.

Here's another film I can thank Letterboxd for introducing to me.

Via someone I follow liking the list ZAxploitation (a list of movies from South Africa; ZA is their country code), I discovered several hundred films I had never heard of before.

I presume that even the vast majority of the hardcore film fans here have little knowledge of that country's movie scene aside from stuff like The Gods Must Be Crazy and it being a place where for decades movies have been made on a budget, and in recent years several highly regarded direct to video and theatrical movies have been made in the country and people have raved about how the movie goes far and above its budget. Clearly, South Africa is the best country to film in if you want your dollars to be put to their best use and have a quality action movie that doesn't cost tens of millions of dollars.

Anyhow, while looking through that list I stumbled upon this movie, and its cover stuck out, in a good way. Reading that it had blaxploitation/exploitation elements definitely caught my eye and it sounded like a sleazy in a 70's way good time, and as Synapse Films put it out on disc a few years ago it's not hard to find; it's even on Amazon Instant Video where at most you only pay 2 bucks to stream it, which is what I did.

This film did surprise me. It does have blaxploitation elements but I say it's more a standard exploitation film than anything else. While the plot is that some people who appear to be vigilantes are killing the scumbag criminals (usually black) of Johannesburg in order to ensure the minorities in the community can be safe and receive monetary assistance-but of course not everything is as it seems-you have black and white people intermingling with each other often and the heroes are a white cop (famous UK actor Nigel Davenport) and a black newspaper reporter (legendary South African actor of stage and screen Ken Gampu) who are longtime friends; I'll admit I was surprised to see that considering it was the mid 70's and it was still years before South Africa got rid of Apartheid.

The movie had a pretty entertaining story and I enjoyed the action scenes you got; sure, the ending was in a dark building and it wasn't always easy to see what was going on, but even with that it was fun action and it should satisfy those who enjoy 70's exploitation, with the novelty of the South African setting adding a different flavor to things.

There are also some colorful characters; the hairy bearded guy on the cover is a minor character but he was amusing; he looked like a stub-nosed Jesus Christ, wore some funny clothes and happened to be the film's screenwriter, the tremendously named in real life BIMA STAGG.

One important thing I learned (besides that in the mid 70's South Africa had Kentucky Fried Chicken) is that the guy who contributed most of the often funky score for the movie is a familiar name: Trevor Rabin! This was before Yes and primarily writing Owner of a Lonely Heart and long before he became a composer and did some of Michael Bay's films. He's actually from South Africa so that explains it.