The 1990 Gene Hackman movie mistaken for a snuff film: “Looks like it could be a homicide”
Like any other leading man, Gene Hackman dropped more than a few bodies onscreen, but only one of his movies became the centre of a short-lived murder investigation after being mistaken for a snuff film.
To be fair, it’s the only interesting or even remotely noteworthy thing about the picture, which, for all intents and purposes, is a steaming pile of shite. Not just any old steaming pile of shite, though, but the single worst picture the legendary two-time Academy Award-winning actor ever made.
That says everything it needs to, since Hackman tied a bow around a generational career with fucking Welcome to Mooseport, of all the terrible ways to end an accomplished, decades-long stint as one of Hollywood’s most dependable and talented performers, but 1990’s Loose Cannons is demonstrably worse.
The grizzled star could be funny when he wanted to be, but not on purpose. Any humour in the French Connection headliner’s work came from the script and the way he delivered or deadpanned his lines, and when he tried to tickle the audience’s funny bone on purpose, it was usually awful, The Birdcage excepted, especially when he and Dan Aykroyd took top billing in the atrocious action comedy.
Hackman admirably thought he could bring the movie up to his level, but some turds can’t be polished, no matter how hard anyone tries. Fittingly, the story revolves around a mythical film of its own, albeit not in a good way, with the two leads playing cops who wade their way through a string of murders in an attempt to recover an Adolf Hitler-starring sex tape, which is as nauseatingly bad as it sounds.
Almost a quarter of a century after Loose Cannons deservedly flopped and took its ignominious place as the worst-reviewed picture that Hackman had ever been in, it found itself back in the news when a film strip was discovered at a Calgary landfill, one that showed a man wielding a knife over what appeared to be a freshly-killed dead body.
“This potentially looks like it could be a homicide, or someone capturing a homicide, or one of these snuff films,” police spokesman Kevin Brookwell insisted. With a murder investigation officially underway, the case was closed soon after when a police officer noticed that the suspect looked an awful lot like Aykroyd.
One internet search later, and they discovered that it was, in fact, Aykroyd, in footage from a shit flick. “In the end, it was kind of humorous that it was just a movie,” Brookwell concluded. “And within a day of us finding out, we were able to move on.” Had it been from one of the Ghostbusters and Saturday Night Live star’s movies that people had actually watched, then there wouldn’t have been a faux murder case at all.
Hitting the nail on the head, when Aykroyd was contacted for comment about the 24-hour snuff film probe caused by Loose Cannons, he suggested that “the movie should have been left in the landfill where it belongs,” but at least it finally managed to contribute something entertaining to society at long last.
