Who on earth would want to reboot Faces of Death? While it’s technically a horror franchise — eight installments were released between 1978 and 1999, all of them going straight to video — the series isn’t famous for its characters, or its lore, or even its special effects. Faces of Death is simply a sicko oddity, an American version of Italian “Mondo” movies that blurred the lines between documentary and exploitation cinema in the 1960s and ‘70s. In essence, it’s just a clip show, a series of vignettes held together by a narrator who explains that what you’re about to see is real. (It wasn’t, but we’ll get into that in a minute.) There’s no real art to it, just a parade of footage purporting to show real deaths by alligator, car crash, electric chair, bullet, and one especially grisly parachute accident, punctuated with interviews with medical examiners and hitmen who make a living out of seeing death up close. |
