As someone who’s watched giant animal movies ranging from B-movie classics like Lake Placid to questionable time wasters like Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre, it never occurred to me that there hadn’t been one about a giant killer turtle. So when I saw Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made on this year’s Salem Horror Fest lineup I knew I had to see it and get to the bottom of this mystery.
The documentary first introduces us to the filmmakers, Mike Savino and Mark Veau, who describe the full premise of the movie. The story of Snapper would’ve taken place in a small town who are blissfully unaware that the mayor of the town is allowing chemicals to be dumped into their lake to skirt EPA regulations, creating a killer snapping turtle. An outsider arrives just as the bodies start piling up, and it’s a race against time for him to clear his name and reveal the true culprit.
After that we hear from Scott Andrews, the special effects artist, who details how he built the various models for the snapping turtle used in production. The rest of the 30 minute runtime is spent discussing the difficulties the then-novice Snapper team had bringing it to life and their hopes to one day complete the project.
While there isn’t a ton of footage of the movie outside of what was used in the trailer, what was present was visually interesting. The storyboards added throughout also helped to flesh out what the Snapper team hoped to accomplish and brought home the Jaws-inspired story that did leave me wishing it was completed.
Unfortunately, even with a solid short under their belts, entitled Attack of the Killer Refrigerator, the team just didn’t know the scope of work that’d be needed to make Snapper into a reality. Between the price of creating the turtle models and other visual effects, the expense of shooting on film instead of making the switch to video, and not being in a major filmmaking hub with access to producers, their passion for the story was easily overshadowed by a lack of funds. Had Snapper been completed, the film would’ve fit perfectly on the shelf in your local video store alongside the newest from Roger Corman’s New Horizons Pictures.
John Campopiano’s Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made is a fascinating peek into low-budget filmmaking in the early 1990s and I’d love to see him continue to hunt down other almost-movies and present them to us in the same way done here. While I do wish there was more to this documentary, the clear and concise nature of it left me less focused on the creature itself and more interested in how this scrappy group of friends were planning to get the project to the silver screen.
If in a few years’ time we get a Syfy original about a killer snapping turtle I’ll look back on Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made and know that someone out there was listening; and our lazy Saturday afternoons are better off because of it.
