Its retitling as The Day After Halloween (or The Night After Halloween if you saw it on video) in the States to capitalise on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) has led to the misunderstanding that this modest Australian thriller is a slasher film. It isn’t. It involves a young woman being menaced and terrorised by a stalker, but it’s a very long way from being a slasher, no matter how enthusiastic the US distributors were. It was directed by Simon Wincer (later of Harlequin (1980), D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1981) among others, produced by the Australian Roger Corman, Anthony I. Ginnane and co-written by the indefatigable Everett de Roche, the engine of the late 70s/early 80s Ozploitation boom.

Angela (Sigrid Thornton, soon to become one of the inmates of Wentworth Detention Centre in the inexplicably popular soap opera Prisoner/Prisoner: Cell Block H (1979-1986)), a naïve young hairdresser in Melbourne dreams of living abroad, but her ambitions are often thwarted by her overbearing mother. She’s recently split up from her older boyfriend Daryl (Vincent Gil), an ice cream truck driver, and fears that her life is rapidly going nowhere. Her model friend Madeline (Chantal Contouri) persuades her to try her hand some modelling of her own and takes her to eccentric photographer Linsey (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who takes topless photographs of her on a beach for an ad campaign for a new cologne. She’s horrified when the ad is printed and her face is clearly visible (Linsey told her it wouldn’t be) but it provides her with the impetus to finally move out of her mother’s home. But as she becomes more deeply embroiled in the exploitative world of modelling, she picks up a stalker who leaves a pig’s head in her bed – could it be Daryl, whose desperate to rekindle their relationship? The bitchy Madeline? Linsey, who photographs dead mice? Or Elmer (Robert Bruning), the wealthy owner of the modelling agency she works for?

Red herrings are everywhere but in truth, it’s not all that hard to work out who’s behind it all, but that’s the least of Snapshot‘s problems. Anyone approaching it lured in by the retitling is for a massive disappointment as the film is barely a horror film let alone a slasher – with its modelling milieu it actually more closely resembles Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) – based on a story by John Carpenter – with all the psychic stuff taken out. It’s one of De Roche’s lesser scripts and Ginnane later suggested that the film was made quickly to ride on the success of their previous film together, the altogether better Patrick (1978), blaming its box office failure in Australia on the lack of the imported American or British star that was still deemed important at the time.

While Thornton makes for an appealingly vulnerable heroine, her part is mostly underwritten, and the rest of the cast are largely left with oddball characters that are hard to warm to. Keays-Byrne (Toecutter in Mad Max (1979) and Immortan Joe in Mad Max Fury Road (2015)) suffers the most, his Linsey being such a blatant red herring (we first meet him splashing ketchup on a dead mouse to give the impression that it suffered a violent death for a photograph), given to making statements about a fascination with death, that we just can’t take him at all seriously. Far more fun is Greek-Australian actress Contouri who lays it on thick while seemingly channelling Joan Collins in The Stud (1978) as Angela’s chain-smoking, lesbian friend/would-be lover. She would be better in Ginnane’s next production the hi-tech vampire film Thirst (1979), but here she often chews the scenery shamelessly and the film is often a lot better for it.

Less fun is the awful disco/jazz/funk score from Australia’s one-man film scoring machine Brian “not the guitarist from Queen” May, which reaches its nadir in some terrible nightclub scenes that feature a dreadful song from a badly made-up, leather-clad rocker who gets a whole band sound out of a single acoustic guitar, and lots of very bad dancing. These sort of scenes were everywhere in the late 70s and one could often tell how bad a film was going to be by the dreadfulness of its disco scene. They suggest that Ginnane and Wincer thought they were epitome of late 70s sophistication and that maybe they were going for the feel of a giallo, but somehow they manage to leave all the sex and violence (and bottles of J&B whiskey) at home.

Snapshot is at its best when its concentrating on the character study of a naïve young woman trying to find her way in the dangerous and exploitative world of modelling. The title Snapshot is the more appropriate one here, referring not only to the photography that’s a recurrent theme throughout the film, but also the snapshot it takes of Angela’s life. The stalker stuff is less assured and rather too obvious to work effectively. It’s a film constantly at war with itself, trying at times to be a serious, “respectable” thriller with half-baked feminist overtones (every man Angela meets is creepy and predatory), while constantly threatening to become – and often actually becoming – a trashy, exploitation piece. It’s hard to know how seriously to take claims that the film has a feminist angle given how often Wincer keeps coming back to that one topless shot of Angela – at the end, the stalker’s room is covered literally floor to ceiling in the same shot.

Although the identity of the killer is easy to guess, the waters are needlessly muddied in the final moments with a pointless epilogue that brings back Daryl and Madeline to cast aspersions on them but without actually resolving what it was trying to say. There’s a huge sense of anti-climax at the end, as though nothing has really happened despite all the incident. The net result is a disappointing film, well enough made and occasionally interesting, but never quite able to work out what it wants to be, a serious study of a woman’s place in the world but a stalker/slasher film. It ends up not being either and is one of the lesser films of the Ozploitation boom, though outside Australia, it performed much better – though possibly due to that wholly misleading alternate title.