Faces of Death (1978)
Directed by John Alan Schwartz
Faces of Death is one of the most infamous horror films ever made. It was banned in tons of countries, but people seemed to find VHS copies to watch. Presented as real deaths caught on tape, the movie was seen as somewhat of a snuff film, and caused an uproar. Shudder recently added this to its service, so I figured I should check it out.
This is presented as a documentary by a doctor presenting his finds on death. Throughout the film we see: car accidents, plane crashes, mamings, dog fighting, slaughterhouses, amazonian tribal rituals, and many other disturbing things. I have to say that many of the things shown were just typical movie special effects. Most notable is the monkey scene. Where a spider monkey is trapped in a table, and people bash it’s head in and eat his brains. The brains are cauliflower, covered in fake blood. The scene is still quite disturbing. Most of this movie is either boring, or disturbing. So it definitely is not an easy watch. I referred to it as a “one time watch”, my buddy Jack referred to it as a “no time watch.”
The disturbing content isn’t the only thing that makes this movie a hard watch. The audio is atrocious. The narrator’s volume seems to go up and down constantly and theres lots of white noise at times. This isn’t even decent by a documentary standard. It has no true point, and “studying death” seems like a bizarre way to just show people dying. The most disturbing part of the movie is when they show the aftermath of a woman getting hit by a semi whilst riding a bike. The footage is real, you see the corpse, then you see people scraping blood clots and brain matter off the road.
I’m not sure the appeal of this type of movie. If you’re showing all real events and footage, ok, then it would almost be considered informative. Once you add special effects, it almost becomes disrespectful to the people whom actually died, like the bike lady. If you want to watch this, go for it, it has it’s place in history, but it is a piece of shit. I give this an F. More like Feces of Death, am I right?
