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Directed by: John Alan Schwartz Starring: Michael Carr Some say that this film is the mother of the "Shockumentary" genre. And there's no denying that it's pretty gruesome, and would probably shock the pants off most people. However, it's also horribly repetitive - there's only so many times you can watch animals (or reasonable facsimilies thereof) get slaughtered before you start looking at your watch. The make-up effects are pretty well done and quite often realistic (with a few exceptions - the monkey head for instance), but some pretty huge cock-ups on the part of director Schwartz... sorry, Conan le Cilaire gives the scenes away as fake - the execution with multiple camera angles INSIDE a gas chamber, for instance!  If you want to watch a Faces of Death film, I'd recommend the second one over this, as it has better variety and less obvious fakery. RATING: 1.5 PROS: Some good make-up effects CONS: Gets pretty boring, some of the fake scenes are REALLY obvious ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077533/combined
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Jul 29, 2004 19:44
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Ahhh, America's Creepiest Home Videos There are many different Faces of Death videos and it basically comes down to this, if you are sick and twisted and like to watch people die in various ways then this is the film series for you. Others that might enjoy these films include morticians, satanists, chefs (monkey brains, lizards, and puppies), general weirdos, and Bible group leaders. Ok, maybe not the last one. I saw the first one a LONG time ago on some bootlegged video and wasn't impressed much. Then when I was 16 my dad rented The Best of and that was just as bad. You get to see some guy bunjie jump off of a building but they forgot to take in account that some office buildings don't have a 13th floor due to bad luck  so instead of bouncing back up, he bounces on the pavement. There's nothing here to see other than shock value (and giant contaminated leeches killing people). 1/5
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Jul 29, 2004 20:35
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FYAD has jaded me to everything. Faces of Death is just boring crap. 1/5
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Jul 29, 2004 21:58
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I remember finding a copy of this when I was 11 and being so loving excited! Why? I really don't know. Maybe it's because so few things are legally verboten to a kid of a eleven and most of those are the kinds of things that an eleven-year-old isn’t interest in. Smokes and beer didn't interest me, and since my dad's illegal cable box provided me with all of the softcore porn that I could handle, death videos were the only things that were completely out of reach that I wanted to reach for. I was attracted to shiniest of the forbidden fruits, as many kids are. This was before you had so many choices in death videos, bear in mind. The special interest section at Dollar Video has at least twenty of them nowadays, ranging from the rather benign "Traces of Death" to the surprisingly gruesome "Banned from Television." In 1992 it was either “Faces of Death” or “Mondo Cane,” so this was the FIRST time that I had ever scene anything like this. I called over a friend and we popped in the tape. Total disappointment. It was so friggin staged that even at such a young age and even without knowing a drat thing about death videos I could tell that most of it was fake. Horribly produced fake newscasts introduced poorly acted scenes, dulling whatever effect the rare shots of actual cadavers might have had. I do find appeal in intense gore and watching horrific videos, even to this day, as I know a surprising amount of other people do. I don’t consider this a perversion, as I gain no recognizable gratification from doing it, but I am well aware it is still a very socially unacceptable thing to do. But unlike most of my other aberrant habits (and trust me, there are many of them), I’ve never bothered to come up with a justification for my gore fascination: I get nothing out of it, it serves no purpose, and it’s creepy. So why do I do it? Raw stimulation, I think. That’s my best guess, and since a more complicated explanation would most likely be the convoluted result of a tired mind trying to justify himself to himself rather than to those he is explaining himself to, I will leave it at those two simple words. Raw stimulation. Seeing things that you have never seen before and so feeling things that you’ve never quite felt before. Bud Dwyer’s fountain flowing fast like a faucet. Vic Morrow’s helicopter blades. Beheadings. Immolation. Things you never see on TV making you think thoughts you’ve never thought before without having to read or interpret. Nothing gets you thinking like death, and nothing gives you death better than moving pictures. And that’s exactly why “Faces of Death” sucks. It takes horror and waters it down. It’s like opium diluted with talcum powder. When I want a quick fix, I want the hard stuff. Don’t insult an addict, that’s how you get cut. 1.0
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Jul 31, 2004 07:42
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