FACES OF DEATH - Schlockumentary!

Despite being a fan of all kinds of bad exploitation cinema, I was never really into the Mondo films. Oh, sure - I've seen trailers for Secret Africa , Mondo Cane, and Shocking Asia before - but as a genre it never really floated my boat. In fact, I can only recall ever seeing one: Faces of Death.

Oh, before we roll, I should explain Mondo. A mondo film is a documentary film, usually depicting sensational topics and scenes - Mondo of course being an itilan word literally means "world". Typical mondo would try and pump up the shock value as much as possible - cruelty to animals, accidents, tribal initiation rites and primitive surgeries are a common feature of a typical mondo, with much of the action staged for the filmmaker's benefit. If Michael Moore included some gratuitous titty shots and a cow being sliced open or two, he would be making a mondo film.

Anyway, Faces of Death is probably the most well know, most infamous Mondo film around. The name was whispered in hushed tones around the schoolyard, with it's most taboo of taboos for subject matter: an actual real life SNUFF film! Nobody had ever dared to watch it though - it was always a big brother or a friend of a friend who had rented it. "Did you hear that they clubbed a monkey to death with hammers and ATE IT'S BRAINS FOR DINNER!"

And so the urban legends grew

Being that this is the most infamous of exploitation movies, it was inevitable that I'd eventually get around to seeing it. Renting, mind you, not buying. Of course seeing it again decades later, out of the subculture of the schoolyard, the movie is - and I hate to break this to you - painfully, obviously fake. Not all of it - there's still quite a bit of natural disaster stock footage, the concentration camp scene and the mortuary stuff was probably quite authentic. But the "Man getting eaten by an alligator" scene or the "Protester setting themselves on fire" bit or the aforementioned "Monkey getting hammered to death before the feast" are all clearly staged, and in some instances (like the monkey) the effects are not very convincing.

Oh sure there are a ton of scenes where folks died BEFORE the camera got there, and there are loads of genuine animal slaughters, but as a snuff film - by the strictest sense of the word - it is not.

Okay, now that we've stripped away any of the false pretence of realism, how does the movie stand up? Surprisingly well - provided that you have a stomach for this sort of thing. The film is still interesting, in a morbid sort of way - we as a species are naturally fascinated by this stuff, or why else would everyone slow down on the freeway for an accident? So even beyond the drinking game of picking out what is fake and what isnt, it's still a - well, I hesitate to call it a good movie. Perhaps entertaining is a better word.

THE DVD -
Being a direct to video release (I don't think it ever saw a domestic theatrical release) Faces of Death is a fullscreen effair. Of course thanks to the wide range of source material used for stock footage, video quality is dubious at best. Surpsingly enough, some of the newly shot stuff looks clean and pretty good. Actually, if anything, the clarity of the disc works against Faces of Death. The 6th generation VHS bootleg made it much easier to conceal the fakeness of the monkey heads and the like.

THE EXTRAS -
As far as extras go, the only thing of note is a psudo-documentary called Faces Of Death - Fact of Fiction? . I say psudo because it's done in a very tongue in cheek style with bad puns and stock footage. While it may not be a hard hitting expose on the film, at least it's entertaining - and short.

Documentary aside, we get a handful of trailers including Faces Of Death and some other similar films like The Strange And The Gruesome and Beyond Bizarre - and they all look to be about the same production level and quality of Faces of Death

THE BOTTOM LINE -
A classic of exploitation cinema? I wouldn’t go that far - but there is no denying that Faces of Death has made a mark on movie history. Even folks who don't know anything about Mondo or grindhouse or drive-in flicks know the name. Whether or not it's any good, well that I leave as an exercise to the gentle reader.