4 out of 5

Director: Alan Black

Exploitation or pseudo-documentary?  Commentary or dark comedy?  Trash or film?  And maybe it’s all of these things.  But moreso than the pits of film I’ve been trawling through lately – The Guinea Pig series, August Underground, Nekromantik – Faces of Death feels like a full-on composition, whereas the other flicks all have questionable digressions.  It’s not rightly 3 out of 5 stars, but since some of those films merited a mediocre 3 gibble rating from me, I wanted to make a distinction.

There is something important to note here: that FOD does include a lock of stock newsreel footage, which is fleshed out with a lot of faked footage.  It also includes some segments which you knows must be faked, but these are all shot with a pretty consistent documentary style, scored with a similar over-the-top score (Nekromantik went way over-the-top with this, and it’s one of the more obviously comedic aspects of FOD), and commentated with a similar dry and repetitive style by Michael Carr (playing pathologist “Francis B. Gröss”).  But, as creator John Alan Schwarz (Alan Black) has implied, all of the most ‘troubling’ footage – the suicides, the car crashes, the animal mutilations – already existed.  These things actually happen / have happened and are just being documented on film (or were pulled from news archives).  For GP or AU, you could say that the type of killings they “document” also take place, but there’s a different intention there, graphic scenes created or recreated in order to shock, presented as ‘snuff’ films.  I’ve mentioned in my reviews the merits this can have, simply for the attempt, but it doesn’t really elevate to anything other than what it is.  But FOD includes title cards, and includes a narrative.  There are legit documentaries that trace aspects of what’s spoken of here.  So what does that mean?

Well, just that there’ something actually to this concept.  Though there is an undercurrent of humor – as mentioned, pairing of lighthearted music with tragedy, and a repeated narrative motif of “…but the worst face of death…” or “I’ve had to redefine my understanding of death…” – that doesn’t negate that there is actually a script, and one that follows a thread of the different ways that we as people cause death, that technology causes death, and the ways we try to challenge that through religion, or supernatural beliefs, and what our abilities to do such things or our reasons to do such things might mean.  Is that all inherent in what’s presented?  Yes and no, depending on your take on this.  Yes – even scripted some of these concepts are spoken aloud, challenged.  But, well, this is still a shock video, despite the efforts to mostly make it look like a documentary.

Elsewhere I read that current viewers won’t get the context of this in a youtube age.  But I think it makes it more contextual.  Because I’ve been exposed to so much nonsense and gore now and this can be re-released on bluray that I no longer need to hunt it down in a dusty corner of a one-off rental shop and then watch it behind a closed door with a group of people shielding their eyes… it’s not a video nasty, it has interviews and behind-the-scenes footage attached to it.  So I can watch it with that awareness, with the edges sheared off, and focus on the questions it poses and wonder what my reaction to acts that are committed every day by doctors and butchers means.