I hold in my hands the extremely controversial (blu-ray, 30th Anniversary edition of) Faces of Death documentary film which appeared in the eighties. In this report I have yet to see the director’s feature length commentary or any of the other special features because the film is sickening enough. When I was in my elementary school days and VHS was king Faces of Death was the ultimate scandalous treasure to young curious minds. I remember it spawning several sequels (up to 6 or more)and imitations like Traces of Death and The Many Faces of Death.

It starts out with an array of coroner scenes where they open up the bodies and some narration about how death awaits us all. The narrator is a coroner who’s been fascinated by death and want’s to make a documentary film about his feelings on the subject and expose his extensive knowledge of death. First he shows us some of his best material. The infamous monkey meal scene is shown intact and it’s real as far as I know. The varied work on decomposing corpses in the med school is pure disgust and horror. I don’t want to see the real shit here folks, let’s keep it on the down-low. The truth of gore really brings us to our knees and we puke out our cheap preconceptions. But we don’t want to go that far down. Let me state that I believe half the film is authentic but it all feels spooky to me.

In this second act it gets more boring, except for the electrocution scene and a couple of others. There is more narration and boring bullshit. The soundtrack to this film is like hippie shit. It dosen’t match the onscreen deaths. Here we are introduced to suicide, violent criminal behavior and stunts and mishaps gone deadly wrong. The narrator now speaks about responsibility with our lives and how one may avoid unnecessary risks. More boring parts come now. He talks about the holocaust, the concentration camps and war in general and all it’s atrocities. The pace slows down, we move on to cruel animal killings, slaughterhouses and watching chickens dance with their heads off.

Now we move onto the afterlife. What follows when our bodies are ravaged by death? Does our eternal soul move on? We’d certainly like to believe so. Without delving into religion he sets up conversation with a man who has had a bad run of luck. This guy lost his daughter to cancer, or was it a hit and run? Then his wife committed suicide a month after. He agrees to have paranormal specialists check out his house. After a while they find proof that his family is still roaming about the place. Now they bring in a medium. I can’t believe a serious documentary would go this route. Anyway, the medium does her mumbo jumbo, spews out a few incoherent gibberish and we are meant to believe that the after life is waiting for us.

I cannot overstate how disgusting this film makes me feel. I would never watch this film again on my own but I would recommend it to others so they could see for themselves how cheap, and debasing this film is. It manages to scare, spook and unravel through all these years. It is only a film but right now it’s the scariest shit I own!

- Jorge Antonio Lopez